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A GARDEN OF PEACE 

F. FRANKFORT MOORE 




[Frontispiece] 



THE CASTLE GATEWAY AND KEEP 



A 

GARDEN OF PEACE 

A MEDLEY IN QUIETUDE 



BY 
F.^FRANKFORT MOORE 

AUTHOR OF 
"THE JESSAMT BRIDE," ETC. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




NEW XBJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






^ v 



COPYRIGHT, 1920 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



OCT 27 
©CI.A601087 



o 



TO 

DOROTHY 

ROSAMUND FRANCIE 

OLIVE MARJORIE 

URSULA 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Castle Gateway and Keep .... Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The " Creeper-Clad Residence " 24 r 

Formal Beds and Rose Border 32 V 

The Peacock Arch 48 *s 

The Cascade (Monoliths from Giant's Causeway in 

Foreground) 64 -^ 

The House Garden 80 ^ 

Rose Pillar and Pergola 112 ^ 

The Temple and the Templars 128 v 

The Shelter of Artemis 144 v' 

The Ali Baba Place 160 ►•' 

A Rose Colonnade 168 w 

A Lily Pond 176 - 

Entrance to the Italian Garden 208 - 

A Glimpse of the Italian Garden 224 ^ 

The Entrance to a Greenhouse 240 1/ 

A Stone Seat 264 v 

The Herbaceous Terrace 272 1/ 

Constructing the Peach Alley 296 I 



vii 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 



A GARDEN OF 
PEACE 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

Dorothy frowns slightly, but slightingly, at the 
title; but when challenged to put her frown into 
words she has nothing worse to say about it than 
that it has a certain catchpenny click — the world is 
talking about The Peace and she has an impression 
that to introduce the word even without the very 
definite article is an attempt to derive profit from a 
topic of the hour — something like backing a horse 
with a trusty friend for a race which you have 
secret information it has won five minutes earlier — 
a method of amassing wealth resorted to every day, 
I am told by some one who has tried it more than 
once, but always just five minutes too late. 

I don't like Dorothy's rooted objection to my liter- 
ary schemes, because I know it to be so confoundedly 
well rooted; so I argue with her, assuring her that 
literary men of the highest rank have never shown 
any marked reluctance to catch the pennies that are 
thrown to them by the public when they hit upon a 

ll 



12 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

title that jingles with the jingle of the hour. To de- 
scend to an abject pleasantry I tell her that a taking 
title is not always the same as a take-in title ; but, for 
my part, even if it were 

And then I recall how the late R. D. Blackmore 
(whose works, by the way, I saw in a bookseller's at 
Twickenham with a notice over them — " by a local 
author ") accounted for the popularity of Lorna 
Doone: people bought it believing that it had some- 
thing to do with the extremely popular engagement 
— " a Real German Defeat," Tenniel called it in his 
Punch cartoon — of the Marquis of Lome and the 
Princess Louise. And yet so far from feeling any 
remorse at arriving at the Temple of Fame by the 
tradesman's entrance, he tried to get upon the same 
track again a little later, calling his new novel Alice 
Lorraine: people were talking a lot about Alsace- 
Lorraine at the time, as they have been doing ever 
since, though never quite so loudly as at the present 
moment (I trust that the publishers of the novel are 
hurrying on with that new edition) . 

But Dorothy's reply comes pat: If Mr. Blackmore 
did that, all she can say is that she doesn't think any 
the better of him for it; just what the Sabbatarian 
Scotswoman said when the act of Christ in plucking 
the ears of corn on the Sabbath Day was brought 
under her ken. 

" My dear," I cry, " you shouldn't say that about 
Mr. Blackmore: you seem to forget that his second 
name was Doddridge, and I think he was fully justi- 
fied in refusing to change the attractive name of his 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 18 

heroine of the South Downs because it happened to 
catch the ears (and the pence) of people interested in 
the French provinces which were pinched by the 
Germans, who added insult to injury by transforming 
Alsace-Lorraine to Elsass-Lothringen. And so far 
as my own conscience is concerned " 

" Your own what? " cried Dorothy. 

" My own conscience — literary conscience, of 
course." 

"Oh, that one? Well?" 

" I say, that so far as — as — as I am concerned, I 
would not have shrunk from calling a book A Garden 
in Tipperary if I had written it a few years ago when 
all England and a third of France were ringing with 
the name Tipperary. 

" Only then it would have been a Garden of War, 
but now it suits you — your fancy, to make it a Garden 
of Peace." 

" It's not too late yet; if you go on like this, I think 
I could manage to introduce a note of warfare into it 
and to make people see the appropriateness of it as 
well ; so don't provoke me." 

" I will not," said Dorothy, with one of her per- 
plexing smiles. 

And then she became interesting; for she was ready 
to affirm that every garden is a battlefield, even when 
it is not run by a husband and his wife — a dual 
system which led to the most notorious horticultural 
fiasco on record. War, according to Milton, origi- 
nated in heaven, but it has been carried on with great 
energy ever since on earth, and the first garden of 



14 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

which there is a literary record maintained the heav- 
enly tradition. So does the last, which has brought 
forth fruit and flowers in abundance through the 
slaughter of slugs, the crushing of snails, the immola- 
tion of leather- jackets, the annihilation of earwigs, 
and is now to be alluded to as a Garden of Peace, if 
you please. 

Dorothy can be very provoking when she pleases 
and is wearing the right sort of dress; and when she 
has done proving that the most ancient tradition of 
a garden points to a dispute not yet settled, between 
the man and his wife who were running it, she begins 
to talk about the awful scenes that have taken place 
in gardens. We have been together in a number of 
gardens in various parts of the world: from those 
of the Borgias, where, in the cool of the evening, 
Lucrezia and her relations communed on the strides 
that the science and art of toxicology was making, 
on to the little Trianon where the diamond necklace 
sparkled in the moonlight on the eve of the rising of 
the people against such folk as Queens and Cardinals 
— on to the gardens of the Temple, where the roses 
were plucked before the worst of the Civil Wars of 
England devastated the country — on to Cherry 
Orchard, near Kingston in the island of Jamaica, 
where the half-breed Gordon concocted his patriotic 
treason which would have meant the letting loose of 
a jungle of savages upon a community of civilisation, 
and was only stamped out by the firm foot of the 
white man on whose shoulders the white man's burden 
was laid, and who snatched his fellow-countrymen 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 15 

from massacre at the sacrifice of his own career; for 
party government, which has been the curse of Eng- 
land, was not to be defrauded of its prey because Gov- 
ernor Eyre had saved a colony from annihilation. 
These are only a few of the gardens in which we have 
stood together, and Dorothy's memory for their asso- 
ciations is really disconcerting. I am disconcerted; 
but I wait, for the wisdom of the serpent of the 
Garden comes to me at times — I wait, and when I 
have the chance of that edgeways word which some- 
times I can't get in, I say, — 

" Oh, yes, those were pleasant days in Italy among 
the cypresses and myrtles, and in Jamaica with its 
palms. I think we must soon have another ramble 
together." 

" If it weren't for those children — but where should 
we go? " she cried. 

" I'm not sure," I said, as if revolving many memo- 
ries, " but I think some part of the Pacific Slope " 

" Gracious, why the Pacific Slope, my man? " 

" Because a Pacific Garden must surely be a 
Garden of Peace ; and that's where we are going now 
with the title-page of a book that is to catch the 
pennies of the public, and resemble as nearly as I 
can make it — consistent with my natural propensity 
to quarrel with things that do not matter in the least 
— one of the shadiest of the slopes of the Island 
Valley of Avilion — 

" Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly, for it lies 



16 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns 
And bowery hollows, crown'd with summer sea." 

Luckily I recollected the quotation, for if I had not 
been letter-perfect I should have had a poor chance 
of a bright future with Dorothy. 

As it was, however, she only felt if the big tomato 
was as ripe as it seemed, and said, — 

" ' Orchard-lawns.' H'm, I wonder if Tennyson, 
with all his * careful-robin ' observation of the little 
things of Nature was aware that you should never 
let grass grow in an apple orchard." 

" I wonder, indeed," I said, with what I considered 
a graceful acquiescence. " But at the same time I 
think I should tell you that there are no little things 
in Nature." 

" I suppose there are not," said she. " Anyhow, 
you will have the biggest tomato in Nature in your 
salad with the cold lamb. Is that the bell ? " 

" It is the ghost-tinkle of the bell of the bell-wedder 
who was the father of the lamb," said I poetically. 

" So long as you do not mention the mother of the 
lamb when you come to the underdone stratum, I 
shall be satisfied," said she. 

PS.— (1.30)— And I didn't. 

PPS.— (1.35)— But I might have. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND 

This town of ours is none other than Yardley Parva. 
Every one is supposed to know that the name means 
" The Little Sheltered Garden," and that it was given 
this name by a mixed commission of Normans and 
Romans. The Normans, who spoke a sort of French, 
gave it the first syllable, which is the root of what 
became jardin, and which still survives in the " back- 
yard " of American literature ; meaning not the back- 
yard of an English home, where broken china and 
glass and other incidental rubbish are thrown to work 
their way into the bowels of the earth, but a place of 
flowers and beans and pumpkins. The surname, 
Parva, represents the influence of the Romans, who 
spoke a sort of Latin. Philologists are not whole- 
hearted about the " ley," but the general impression 
is that it had a narrow escape from being " leigh," an 
open meadow; ley, however, is simply "lee," or a 
sheltered quarter, the opposite to " windward." 

Whatever foundation there may be for this phil- 
ology — whether it is derived from post hoc evidence 
or not — every one who knows the place intimately 
will admit that if it is not literally exact, it should 
be made so by the Town Council ; for it is a town of 
sheltered little gardens. It has its High Street: and 

17 



18 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

this name, a really industrious philologist will tell 
you, is derived, not from its occupying any elevated 
position, but from the fact that the people living on 
either side were accustomed to converse across the 
street, and any one wishing to chat with an opposite 
neighbour, tried to attract his attention with the usual 
hail of "hie there!"; and as there was much cross- 
questioning and answering, there was a constant 
chorus of "hie, hie!" so that it was really the gibe 
of strangers that gave it its name, only some fool of 
a purist seven or eight hundred years ago acquired 
the absurd notion that the word was " High " instead 
of "Hie!" So it was that Minnesingers' Lane 
drifted into Mincing Lane, I have been told. It had 
really nothing to do with the Min Sing district of 
China, where the tea sold in that street of tea-brokers 
came from. Philology is a wonderful study; and no 
one who has made any progress in its by-paths should 
ever be taken aback or forced to look silly. 

The houses on each side of the High Street are 
many of them just as they were four or five hundred 
years ago. Some of them are shops with bow fronts 
that were once the windows of parlours in the days 
when honest householders drank small ale for break- 
fast and the industrious apprentices took down the 
shutters from their masters' shops and began their 
day's work somewhere about five o'clock in midsum- 
mer, graduating to seven in midwinter. There are 
now some noble plate-glass fronts to the shops, but 
there are no apprentices, and certainly no masters. 
Scores of old, red-tiled roofs remain, but they are no 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 19 

more red than the red man of America is red. The 
roofs and the red man are of the same hue. Sixty 
years ago, when slate roofs became popular, they 
found their way to Yardley Parva, and were reck- 
oned a guarantee of a certain social standing. If you 
saw a slate roof and a cemented brick front you might 
be sure that there was a gig in the stable at the back. 
You can now tell what houses had once been tiled by 
the pitch of the roofs. This was not altered on the 
introduction of the slates. 

But with the innovations of plate-glass shop-fronts 
and slate roofs there has happily been no change in 
the gardens at the back of the two rows of the houses 
of the High Street. Almost every house has still its 
garden, and they remain gay with what were called 
in my young days " old-fashioned flowers," through 
the summer, and the pear-trees that sprawl across 
the high dividing walls in Laocoon writhings — the 
quinces that point derisive, gnarled fingers at the old 
crabs that give way to soundless snarls against the 
trained branches of the Orange Pippins — the mulber- 
ries that are isolated on a patch of grass — all are 
to-day what they were meant to be when they were 
planted in the chalk which may have supplied Roman 
children with marbles when they had civilized them- 
selves beyond the knuckle-bones of their ancestors' 
games. 

I cannot imagine that much about these gardens 
has changed during the changes of a thousand years, 
except perhaps their shape. When the Anglo-Saxon 
epidemic of church-building was running its course, 



20 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the three-quarters-of-a-mile of the High Street did 
not escape. There was a church every hundred yards 
or so, and some of them were spacious enough to hold 
a congregation of fifty or sixty ; and every church had 
its church-yard — that is, as we have seen — its garden, 
equal to the emergencies of a death-rate of perhaps 
two every five years; but when the churches became 
dwelling-houses, as several did, the church-yard be- 
came the back -yard in the American sense : fruit-trees 
were planted, and beneath their boughs the burgesses 
discussed the merits of ale and the passing away of 
the mead bowl, and shook their heads when some 
simpleton suggested that the arrow that killed Rufus 
a few months before was an accidental one. There 
are those gardens to-day, and the burgesses smoke 
their pipes over the six-thirty edition of the evening 
paper that left London at five-fifteen, and listen to 
stories of Dick, who lost a foot at the ford of the 
Somme, or of Tom, who got the M.C. after Mons, 
and went through the four years without a scratch, 
or of Bob, who had his own opinion about the taking 
of Jerusalem, outside which two fingers of his left 
hand are still lying, unless a thieving Arab appro- 
priated them. 

There the chat goes on from century to century on 
the self -same subject — War, war, war. It is certain 
that men left Yardley Parva for the First Crusade; 
one of the streets that ran from the Roman road to 
the Abbey which was founded by a Crusading Nor- 
man Earl, retains the name that was given to it to 
commemorate the capture of Antioch when the news 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 21 

reached England a year or so after the event ; and it 
is equally certain that Yardley men were at Bosworth 
Field, and Yardley men at Tournai in 1709 as well 
as in 1918 — at the Nile in 1798 as well as in 1915; and 
it is equally certain that such of them as came back 
talked of what they had seen and of what their com- 
rades had done. The tears that the mothers proudly 
shed when they talked of those who had not come 
home in 1918 were shed where the mothers of the 
Crusaders of 1099 had knelt to pray for the repose 
of the souls of their dear ones whose bones were 
picked by the jackals of the Lebanon. On the site 
of one of the churches of the market-place there is 
now built a hall of moving pictures — Moving Pictures 
— that is the whole sum of the bustle of the thousand 
years — Moving Pictures. The same old story. Life 
has not even got the instinct of the film-maker: it 
does not take the trouble to change the scenes of the 
exploits of a thousand — ten thousand — years ago, and 
those of to-day. Egypt, the Nile, Gaza, Jerusalem, 
Damascus, Mesopotamia. Moving pictures — walk- 
ing shadows — walking about for a while but all hav- 
ing the one goal — the Garden of Peace ; those gardens 
that surrounded the churches, where now the apple- 
trees bloom and fruit and shed their leaves. 

These little irregular back-gardens are places of 
enchantment to me and I think I like those behind 
the smallest of the shops, which are not more than 
thirty feet square, rather than those higher up the 
town, of a full acre or two. These bigger ones do not 
suggest a history beyond the memory of the gardeners 



22 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

who trim the hedges and cut the grass with a ma- 
chine. The small and irregular ones suggest a good 
deal more than a maiden lady wearing gloves, with 
a basket on her arm and a pair of snipping shears 
opening its jaws to bite the head off every bloom that 
has a touch of brown on its edge. But with me it is 
not a matter of liking and not liking; it is a matter 
of liking and liking better — it is the artisan's opinion 
of rival beers (pre-war) : all good but some better 
than others. The little gardens behind the shops are 
lyrics; the big ones behind the villas are excellent 
prose, and excellent prose is frequently quite as prosy 
as excellent verse. They are alive but they are not 
full of the joy of living. The flowers that they bring 
forth suggest nice girls whose education is being care- 
fully attended to by gentlemen who are preparing for 
Ordination. Those flowers do not sing, and I know 
perfectly well that if they were made to sing it would 
be to the accompaniment of a harmonium, and they 
would always sing in tune and in time: but they 
would need a conductor, they would never try any- 
thing on their own — not even when it was dark and 
no one would know anything about it. Somehow 
these borders make me think of the children of Blun- 
dell's Charity — a local Fund which provides for the 
education on religious principles of fifteen children 
born in wedlock of respectable parents. They occupy 
a special bench in the aisle of one of the churches, and 
wear a distinctive dress with white collars and cuffs. 
They attend to the variations of the Sacred Service, 
and are always as tidy and uninteresting as the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 23 

borders in the wide gardens behind the houses that are 
a quarter of a mile beyond the gardens of the High 
Street shops. 

But it is in these wide gardens that the earliest 
strawberries are grown, and to them the reporter of 
the local newspaper goes in search of the gigantic 
gooseberry or the potato weighing four pounds and 
three ounces; and that is what the good ladies with 
the abhorred shears and the baskets — the Atropussies, 
in whose hands lie the fates of the fruits as well as of 
the flowers — consider the sum of high gardening: the 
growth of the abnormal is their aim and they are as 
proud of their achievement as the townsman who took 
to poultry was of his when he exhibited a bantam 
weighing six pounds. 

Now I hold that gardens are like nurseries — nurs- 
eries of children, I mean — and that all make an appeal 
to one's better nature, that none can be visited with- 
out a sense of pleasure even though it may be no more 
than is due to the anticipation of getting away from 
them; therefore, I would not say a word against the 
types which I venture to describe as I have found 
them. The worst that I can say of them is that they 
are easily described, and the garden or the girl that 
can be described will never be near my heart. Those 
gardens are not the sort that I should think of marry- 
ing, though I can live on the friendliest of terms with 
them, particularly in the strawberry season. They do 
not appeal to the imagination as do the small and 
irregular ones at the rear of the grocer's, the sta- 
tioner's, the fishmonger's, the bootmaker's, or the 



24 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

chymist's — in this connection I must spell the name 
of the shop with a y : the man who sits in such a garden 
is a chymist, not a chemist. I could not imagine a 
mere chemist sniffing the rosemary and the tansy and 
the rue au naturel: the mere chemist puts his hand 
into a drawer and weighs you out an ounce of the 
desiccated herbs. 

In one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's earlier novels — I 
think it is The Mayor of Casterbridge — he describes 
a town, which is very nearly as delightfully drowsy 
as our Yardley Parva, as one through which the bees 
pass in summer from the gardens at one side to those 
at the other. In our town I feel sure that the bees 
that enter among the small gardens of sweet scents 
and savours at one end of the High Street, never 
reach the gardens of the gigantic gooseberry at the 
other; unless they make a bee-line for them at the 
moment of entering; for they must find their time 
fully occupied among the snapdragons of the old 
walls, the flowers of the veronica bushes, and the but- 
tons of the tall hollyhocks growing where they please. 

When I made, some years ago, a tour of Wessex, 
I went to Casterbridge on a July day, and the first 
person I met in the street was an immense bee, and 
I watched him hum away into the distance just as 
Mr. Hardy had described him. He seemed to be 
boasting that he was Mr. Hardy's bee, just as a Pres- 
byterian Minister, who had paid a visit to the Holy 
Land to verify his quotations, boasted of the reference 
made to himself in another Book. 

" My dear friends," said he, " I read in the Sacred 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 25 

Book the prophecy that the land should be in heaps; 
I looked up from the page, and there, before my very 
eyes, lay the heaps. I read that the bittern should 
cry there; I looked up, and lo! close at hand stood 
the bittern. I read that the Minister of the Lord 
should mourn there: I was that Minister/* 

But there are two or three gardens — now that I 
come to think of it there are not so many as three — 
governed by the houses of the " better-class people " 
(so they were described to me when I first came to 
Yardley Parva), which are everything that a garden 
should be. Their trees have not been cut down as 
they used to be forty years ago, to allow the flowers 
to have undisputed possession. In each there are 
groups of sycamore, elm, and silver birch, and their 
position makes one feel that one is on the border of 
a woodland through which one might wander for 
hours. There are tulip-trees, and a fine arbutus on 
an irregular, slightly-sloping lawn, and a couple of 
enormous drooping ashes — twenty people can sit in 
the green shade of either. In graceful groups there 
are laburnums and lilacs. Farther down the slope is 
a well-conceived arrangement of flower-beds cut out 
of the grass. Nearly everything in the second of these 
gardens is herbaceous; but its roses are invariably 
superb, and its lawn with a small lily pond beside it, 
is ideal. The specimen shrubs on a lower lawn are 
perfect as regards both form and flower, and while 
one is aware of the repose that is due to a thoughtful 
scheme of colour, one is conscious only of the effect, 
never being compelled to make use of the word artis- 



26 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

tic. As soon as people begin to talk of a garden being 
artistic you know that it has failed in its purpose, 
just as a portrait-painter has failed if you are im- 
pressed with the artistic side of what he has done. 
The garden is not to illustrate the gardener's art any 
more than the portrait is to make manifest the 
painter's. The garden should be full of art, but so 
artfully introduced that you do not know that it is 
there. I have heard a man say as if he had just 
made a unique discovery, — 

" How extraordinary it is that the arrangements 
of colour in Nature are always harmonious! " 

Extraordinary ! 

Equally extraordinary it is that 

" Treason doth never prosper ; what's the reason ? 
For if it prospers none dare call it treason." 

All our impressions of harmony in colour are de- 
rived from Nature's arrangements of colour, and 
when there is no longer harmony there is no longer 
Nature. Is it marvellous that Nature should be har- 
monious when all our ideas of harmony are acquired 
from Nature? A book might be written on this text 
— I am not sure that several books have not been 
written on it. It is the foundation of the analysis of 
what may be called without cant, " artistic impres- 
sion." It is because it is so trite that I touch upon it 
in my survey of a Garden of Peace. We love the 
green of the woodland because it still conveys to us 
the picture of our happy home of some hundreds of 
thousands of years ago. We find beauty in an oval 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 27 

outline because our ancestors of the woodland spent 
some happy hours bird-nesting. Hogarth's line of 
beauty is beautiful because it is the line of human life 
— the line that Nature has ever before her eyes — the 
line of human love. The colours of countless fruits 
are a delight to us because we have associated those 
colours for tens of thousands of years with the delight 
of eating those fruits, and taking pleasure in the tints 
of the fruits; we take pleasure in the tints of flowers 
because they suggest the joys of the fruits. The 
impression of awe and fear that one of Salvator 
Rosa's " Rocky Landscapes " engenders is due to our 
very distant ancestors' experience of the frequent 
earthquakes that caused these mighty rocks to be 
flung about when the surface of our old mother Earth 
was not so cool as it is to-day, as well as to the 
recollection of the very fearsome moments of a much 
less remote ancestor spent in evading his carnivorous 
enemies who had their dens among these awful rocks. 
From a comparatively recent pastoral parent we have 
inherited our love for the lawn. There were the 
sheep feeding in quiet on the grass of the oasis in the 
days when man had made the discovery that he could 
tame certain animals and keep them to eat at his 
leisure instead of having to spend hours hunting them 
down. 

But so deep an impression have the thousands of 
years of hunting made upon the race, that even among 
the most highly civilised people hunting is the most 
popular of all employments, and the hunter is a hero 
while the shepherd is looked on as a poor sort. 



28 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Yes, there are harmonies in Nature, though all 
makers of gardens do not appreciate them; the dis- 
cordant notes that occasionally assail a lover of Nature 
in a garden that has been made by a nurseryman are 
due to the untiring exertions of the hybridiser. It is 
quite possible to produce " freaks " and " sports " 
both as regards form and colour — " Prodigious mix- 
tures and confusion strange." I believe that some 
professional men spend all their time over experiments 
in this direction, and I have no doubt that some of 
them, having perpetrated a " novelty," make money 
out of it. Equally sure I am that the more conscien- 
tious, when they hit upon a novelty that they feel to 
be offensive, destroy the product without exhibiting 
it. They have not all the hideous unscrupulousness 
of Dr. Moreau — the nearest approach to a devil try- 
ing to copy the Creator who made man in His own 
image. Dr. Moreau made things after his own like- 
ness. He was a great hybridiser. (Mr. H. G. Wells, 
after painting that Devil for us, has recently been 
showing his skill in depicting the God.) 

Now, every one knows that the garden of to-day 
owes most of its glory to the judicious hybridiser, 
but I implore of him to be merciful as he is strong. I 
have seen some heartrending results of his experi- 
ments which have not been suppressed, as they should 
have been. I am told that a great deal in the way of 
developing the natural colours of a certain group of 
flowers can be done by the introduction of chemicals 
into their drinking water. It is like poisoning a well ! 
By such means I believe an unscrupulous gardener 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 29 

could turn a whole border into something resembling 
a gigantic advertisement card of aniline dyes. 

But I must be careful in my condemnations of such 
possibilities. There is a young woman named Rosa- 
mund, who is Dorothy's first-born, and she is ready 
at all seasonable times to give me the benefit of her 
fourteen years' experiences of the world and its ways, 
and she has her own views of Nature as the mother 
of the Arts. After listening to my old-fashioned rail- 
ings against such chromatic innovations as I have 
abused, she maintained a thoughtful silence that sug- 
gested an absence of conviction. 

" Don't you see the awfulness of re-dying a flower 
— the unnaturalness of such an operation? " I cried. 

' Why, you old thing, can't you see that if it's done 
by aniline dyes it's all right — true to Nature and all 
that?" 

" Good heavens ! that a child of mine — Dorothy, 
did you hear her? How can you sit there and smile 
as if nothing had happened? Have you brought her 
up as an atheist or what? " 

" Every one who doesn't agree with all you say isn't 
a confirmed atheist," replied Dorothy calmly. " As 
for Rosamund, what I'm afraid of is that, so far from 
being an atheist, she is rather too much in the other 
direction — like ' Lo, the poor Indian.' She'll explain 
what's in her mind if you give her a chance. What 
do you mean, my dear, by laying the emphasis on 
aniline dyes? Don't you know that most of them 
are awful? " 

" Of course I do, darling," said Rosamund. " But 



30 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

I've been reading about them, and so — well, you see, 
they come from coal tar, and coal is a bit of a tree 
that grew up and fell down thousands of years ago, 
and its burning is nothing more than its giving back 
the sunshine that it — what is the word that the book 
used ? — oh, I remember — the sunshine that it hoarded 
when it was part of the forest. Now, I think that if 
it's natural for flowers to be coloured by the sunshine 
it doesn't matter whether it's the sunshine of to-day. 
or the sunshine of fifty thousand years ago; it comes 
from the sun all the same, and as aniline dyes are the 
sunshine of long ago it's no harm to have them to 
colour flowers now." 

" Daddy was only complaining of the horrid ones, 
my dear," said the Mother, without looking at me. 
'* Isn't that what you meant? " she added, and now she 
looked at me, and though I was suspicious that she 
was smiling under her skin, I could not detect the 
slightest symptom of a smile in her voice. 

" Of course I meant the hideous ones — magenta 
and that other sort of purple thing. I usually make 
my meaning plain," said I, with a modified bluster. 

" Oh," remarked Rosamund, in a tone that sug- 
gested a polite negation of acquiescence. 

There was another little silence before I said, — 

" Anyhow, it was those German brutes who de- 
veloped those aniline things." 

" Oh, yes ; they could do anything they pleased with 
coal tar," said Dorothy. " But the other sort could 
do anything he pleased with the Germans — and he 
did!" 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 31 

" The other sort? " said I inquiringly. 

" Yes, the other sort — the true British product — 
the Jack Tar," said Dorothy; and Rosamund, who 
has a friend who is a midshipman in the Royal Navy, 
clapped her hands and laughed. 

It is at such moments as this that I feel I am not 
master in my own house. Time was when I believed 
that my supremacy was as unassailable as that of the 
Lord High Admiral; but since those girls have been 
growing up I have come to realise that I have been 
as completely abolished as the Lord High Admiral — 
once absolute, but now obsolete — and that the duties 
of office are discharged by a commission. The Board 
of Admiralty is officially the Lords Commissioners 
for discharging the office of Lord High Admiral. 

I hope that this menage will be maintained. The 
man who tries to impose his opinions upon a house- 
hold because he is allowed to pay all the expenses, is 
— anyhow, he is not me. 



CHAPTER THE THIRD 

I believe I interrupted myself in the midst of a visit 
to one of the gardens of the " better-class people " 
who live in the purely residential end of the High 
Street. These are the people whose fathers and 
grandfathers lived in the same houses and took a 
prominent part in preparing the beacons which were 
to spread far and wide the news that Bonaparte had 
succeeded in landing on their coast with that marvel- 
lous flotilla of his. And from these very gardens 
more than two hundred and fifty years earlier the 
still greater grandfathers had seen the blazing 
beacons that sent the news flying northward that the 
Invincible Armada of Spain was plunging and roll- 
ing up the Channel, which can be faintly seen by the 
eye of faith from the tower of the Church of St. Mary 
sub-Castro, at the highest part of the High Street. 
The Invincible Armada! If I should ever organise 
an aggressive enterprise, I certainly would not call it 
" Invincible." It is a name of ill omen. I cannot for 
the life of me remember where I read the story of 
the monarch who was reviewing the troops that he 
had equipped very splendidly to go against the Ro- 
mans. When his thousand horsemen went glittering 
by with polished steel cuirasses and plumed helmets 

32 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 33 

— they must have been the Household Cavalry of the 
period — his heart was lifted up in pride, and he called 
out tauntingly to his Grand Vizier, who was a bit 
of a cynic, — 

" Ha, my friend, don't you think that these will 
be enough for the Romans? " 

" Sure," was the reply. " Oh, yes, they will be 
enough, avaricious though the Romans undoubtedly 
are." 

This was the first of the Invincible enterprises. 
The next time I saw the word in history was in asso- 
ciation with the Spanish Armada, and to-day, over 
a door in my house, I have hung the carved ebony 
ornament that belonged to a bedstead of one of the 
ships that went ashore at Spanish Point on the Irish 
coast. Later still, there was a gang of murderers 
who called themselves " Invincibles," and I saw the 
lot of them crowded into a police-court dock whence 
they filed out to their doom. And what about the 
last of these ruffians that challenged Fate with that 
arrogant word? What of Hindenburg's Invincible 
Line that we heard so much about a few months ago ? 
"Invincible!" cried the massacre-monger, and the 
word was repeated by the arch-liar of the mailed fist 
in half a dozen speeches. Within a few months the 
beaten mongrels were whimpering, not like hounds, 
but like hyenas out of whose teeth their prey is 
plucked. I dare say that Achilles, who made brag a 
speciality, talked through his helmet about that opera- 
tion on the banks of the Styx, and actually believed 
himself to be invincible because invulnerable; but his 



34 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

mother, who had given him the bath that turned his 
head, would not have recognised him when Paris had 
done with him. 

The funny part of the Hindenburg cult — I sup- 
pose it should be written " Kult " — was that there 
was no one to tell the Germans that they were doing 
the work of necromancy in hammering those nails into 
his wooden head. Everybody knows that the only 
really effective way of finishing off an enemy is to 
make a wooden effigy of him and hammer nails into 
it (every sensible person knows that as the nails are 
hammered home the original comes to grief). The 
feminine equivalent of this robust operation is equally 
effective, though the necromancers only recommended 
it for the use of schools. The effigy is made of wax, 
and you place it before a cheerful fire and stick pins 
into it. It has the advantage of being handy and 
economical, for there are few households that cannot 
produce an old doll of wax which would otherwise 
be thrown away and wasted. 

But the Germans pride themselves on having got 
rid of their superstition, and when people have got 
rid of their superstition they have got rid of their 
sense of humour. If they had not been so hasty in 
naming their invincible lines after Wagner's operas 
they would surely have remembered that with the 
Siegfried, the Parsifal, and the rest there was bound 
to be included Der Fliegende Hollander, the pet 
name of the German Cavalry: they were the first to 
fly when the operatic line was broken; and then — 
Gotterdammertmg Hellroter! 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 35 

And why were the Bolsheviks so foolish as to forget 
that the Czar was " Nicky " to their paymaster, 
William, and that that name is the Greek for " Vic- 
ory "? Having destroyed Nicky, how could they look 
for anything but disaster? 

The connection of these jottings with our gardens 
may not be apparent to every one who reads them. 
But though the sense of liberty is so great in our Gar- 
den of Peace that I do not hold myself bound down 
to any of the convenances of composition, and though 
I cultivate rather than uproot even the most flagrant 
forms of digression in this garden, yet it so happens 
that when I begin to write of the most distinguished 
of the gardens of Yardley Parva, I cannot avoid 
recalling that lovely Saturday when we were seated 
among its glorious roses, eating peaches that had just 
been plucked from the wall. We were a large and 
chatty company, and among the party that were 
playing clock golf on a part of a lovely lawn of the 
purest emerald, there did not seem to be one who 
had read the menace of the morning papers. Our 
host was a soldier, and his charming wife was the 
daughter of a distinguished Admiral. At the other 
side of the table where the dish of peaches stood there 
was another naval officer, and while we were swap- 
ping stories of the Cape, the butler was pointing us 
out to a telegraph messenger who had come through 
the French window. The boy made his way to us, 
taking the envelope from his belt. He looked from 
one of us to the other, saying the name of my 
vis-a-vis — " Commander A ? " 



36 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

"I'm Commander A " said he, taking 

the despatch envelope and tearing it open. 
He gave a whistle, reading his message, and 
rose. 

" No reply," he told the messenger, and then 
turned to me. 

" Great King Jehoshaphat ! " he said in a low tone. 
" There is to be no demobilisation of the Fleet, and 
all leave is stopped. I'm ordered to report. And 
you said just now that nothing was going to happen. 
Good-bye, old chap! I've got to catch the 6.20 for 
Devonport! " 

We had been talking over the morning's news, and 
I had said that the Emperor was a master of bluff, 
not business. 

" I'm off," he said. " You needn't say anything 
that I've told you. After all, it may only be a pre- 
cautionary measure." 

He went off; and I never saw him again. 

The precautionary measure that saved England 
from the swoop that Germany hoped to bring off as 
successfully as Japan did hers at Port Arthur in 
1904, was taken not by the First Lord of the Ad- 
miralty, but by Prince Louis of Battenberg, who was 
hounded out of the Service by the clamorous gossip 
of a few women who could find no other way of 
proving their power. 

And the First Lord of the Admiralty let him go; 
while he himself returned to his " gambling " — he so 
designated the most important — the most disastrous 
— incident of his Administration — " a legitimate gam- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 37 

ble." A legitimate gamble that cost his country over 
fifty thousand lives! 

Within a month of the holding of that garden party 
our host had marched away with his men, and within 
another month our dear hostess was a widow. 

That garden, I think, has a note of distinction 
about it that is not shared by any other within the 
circle taken by the walls of the little town, several 
interesting fragments of which still remain. The 
house by which it was once surrounded before the de- 
sire for " short cuts " caused a road to be made 
through it, is by far the finest type of a minor Eliza- 
bethan mansion to be found in our neighbourhood. 
It is the sort of house that the house-agents might, 
with more accuracy than is displayed in many of their 
advertisements, describe as " a perfect gem." It has 
been kept in good repair both as regards its stone 
walls and its roof of stone slabs during the three hun- 
dred — or most likely four hundred years of its exist- 
ence, and it has not suffered from that form of 
destruction known as restoration. It had some nar- 
row escapes in its time, however. An old builder 
who had been concerned in some of the repairs shook 
his head sadly when he assured me that a more pig- 
headed gentleman than the owner of the house at 
that time he had never known. 

" He would have it done with the old material," 
he explained sadly. " That's how it comes to be like 
what it is to-day." And he nodded in the direction 
of the exquisitely-weathered old Caen blocks with the 



38 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

great bosses of house-leek covering the coping. " It 
was no use my telling him that I could run up a nine- 
inch brick wall with proper coping tiles that would 
have a new look for years if no creepers were allowed 
on it, for far less money ; he would have the old stone, 
and those squared flints that you see there." 

"Some people are very obstinate, thank God!" 
said I. 

" I could have made as good a job of it as I did 
of St. Anthony's Church — you know the new aisle in 
St. Anthony's, sir," said he. 

I certainly did know the new aisle in St. Anthony's ; 
but I did not say that I did in the tone of voice in 
which I write. It is the most notorious example of 
what enormities could be perpetrated in the devastat- 
ing fifties and sixties, when a parson and his church- 
wardens could do anything they pleased to their 
churches. 

In a very different spirit was the Barbican of the 
old Castle of Yardley repaired under the care of a 
reverential, but not Reverend, director. Every stone 
was numbered and put back into its place when the 
walls were made secure. 

The gardens and orchards and lawns behind the 
walls which were reconstructed by the owner whose 
obstinacy the builder was lamenting, must extend 
over three or four acres. Such a space allows for a 
deep enough fringe of noble trees, giving more than 
a suggestion of a park-land which had once had sev- 
eral vistas after the most approved eighteenth cen- 
tury type, but which have not been maintained by 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 39 

some nineteenth century owners who were fearful of 
being accused of tolerating anything so artificial as 
design in their gardens. But the " shrubberies " have 
been allowed to remain pretty much as they were 
planted, with magnificent masses of pink may and 
innumerable lilacs. The rose-gardens and the mixed 
borders are chromatic records of the varying tastes of 
generations. 

What made the strongest appeal to me when I 
was wandering through the grounds a year or two 
before that fatal August afternoon was the beauty of 
the anchusas. I thought that I had never seen finer 
specimens or a more profuse variety of their blues. 
One might have been looking down into the indigo 
of the water under the cliffs of Capri in one place, 
and into the delicate ultramarine spaces of the early 
morning among the islands of the iEgean in another. 

I congratulated one of the gardeners upon his 
anchusas, and he smiled in an eminently questionable 
way. 

" Maybe I'm wrong in talking to you about them," 
I said, looking for an explanation of his smile. " Per- 
haps it is not you who are responsible for this bit." 

" It's not that, sir," he said, still smiling. "I'm 
ready to take all the responsibility. You see, sir, I 
was brought up among anchusas: I was one of the 
gardeners at Dropmore." 

I laughed. 

" If I want to know anything about growing 
anchusas I'll know where to come for information," 
I said. 



40 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

The great charm about these gardens, as well as 
those of the Crusaders' planting now enjoyed by 
the people of the High Street, is that among the 
mystery of their shady places on^ would not be 
surprised or alarmed to come suddenly upon a nymph 
or a satyr, or even old Pan himself. It does not 
require one to be 

" A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn," 

to have such an impression conveyed to one, any 
more than it is necessary for one to be given over 
exclusively to a diet of nuts and eggs to enjoy, as I 
hope we all do, a swing on a bough, or, as we grow 
old, alas ! on one of those patent swings made in Paris, 
U.S.A., where one gets all the exuberance of the 
oscillation without the exertion. Good old Pan is not 
dead yet, however insistently the poet may announce 
his decease. He will be the last of all the gods to go. 
We have no particular use for Jove, except as the 
mildest form of a swear word, nor for Neptune, unless 
we are designing a fountain or need to borrow an 
emblem of the Freedom of the Seas — we can even 
carry on a placid existence though Mercury has fallen 
so low as to be opposite " rain and stormy " on the 
barometric scale, but we cannot do without our Pan 
— the jolly, wicked old fellow whom we were obliged 
to incorporate in our new theological system under 
the name of Diabolus. It was he, and not the much- 
vaunted Terpsichore, who taught the infant world 
to dance, to gambol, and to riot in the woodland. 
He is the patron of the forest lovers still, as he was 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 41 

when he first appeared in the shape of an antelope 
skipping from rock to rock while our arboreal an- 
cestors applauded from their boughs and were 
tempted to give over their ridiculous swinging by 
their hands and tails and emulate him on our com- 
mon mother Earth. 

Is there any one of us to-day, I wonder, who has 
not felt as Wordsworth did, that the world of men 
and cities is too much with us, and that the shady 
arbours hold something that we need and that we 
cannot find otherwhere? The claims of the myster- 
ious brotherhood assert themselves daily when we re- 
turn to our haunts of a hundred thousand years ago: 
we can still enjoy a dance on a woodland clearing, and 
a plunge into the sparkling lake by which we dwelt 
for many thousand years before some wretch found 
that the earth could be built up into caves instead of 
dug into for domestic shelter. 

Let any one glance over the illustrated advertise- 
ments in Country Life and see how frequently the 
" old world gardens " are set forth as an irresistible 
attraction of " a desirable residence." The artful ad- 
vertisers know that the appeal of the old world is 
still all-powerful, especially with those who have been 
born in a city and have lived in a city for years. 
Around Yardley there has sprung up quite recently 
a colony of red-brick and, happily, red-roofed villas. 
Nearly all have been admirably constructed, and with 
an appreciation of the modern requirements in which 
comfort and economy are combined. They have all 
gardens, and no two are alike in every particular; 



42 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

but all are trim and easily looked after. They pro- 
duce an abundance of flowers, and they are embow- 
ered in flowering shrubs, every one of which seems 
to me to be a specimen. More cheerful living-places 
could not be imagined ; but it is not in these gardens 
that you need look for the cloven vestiges of a faun 
or the down brushed from the butterfly wings of a 
fairy. Nobody wants them there, and there is no 
chance of any of these wary folk coming where they 
are not wanted. If old Pan were to climb over one of 
these walls and his footprints were discovered in the 
calceolaria bed, the master of the house would put 
the matter in the hands of the local police, or write a 
letter signed " Ratepayer " to the local Chronicle, in- 
quiring how long were highly-taxed residents to be 
subjected to such incursions, and blaming the " au- 
thorities " for their laxity. 

But there is, I repeat, no chance of the slumbers 
of any of the ratepayers being disturbed by a blurred 
vision of Proteus rising from the galvanised cistern, 
or by the blast of Triton's wreathed horn. They will 
not be made to feel less forlorn by a glimpse of the 
former, and they would assuredly mistake the latter 
for the hooter of Simpson's saw-mill. 

" The authorities " look too well after the villas, 
and the very suggestion of " authorities " would send 
Proteus and Triton down to the deepest depths they 
had ever sounded. They only come where they are 
wanted and waited for. It takes at least four gen- 
erations of a garden's growth to allow of the twisted 
boughs of the oak or the chestnut turning into the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 43 

horns of a satyr, or of the gnarled roots becoming 
his dancing shanks. 

It was one of the most intelligent of the ratepayers 
of these bright and well-kept " residences " who took 
me to task for a very foolish statement he had found 
in a novel of mine (6d. edition) which he said he had 
glanced at for a few minutes while he was waiting 
for a train. I had been thoughtless enough to make 
one of the personages, an enterprising stockbroker, 
advocate the promotion of a company for the salvage 
of the diamonds which he had been told Queen Guine- 
vere flung into the river before the appearance of 
the barge with the lily maid of Astolat drifting to the 
landing-place below the terrace. 

" But you know they were not real diamonds — only 
the diamonds of the poet's imagination," he said. 

" I do believe you are right," said I, when I saw 
that he was in earnest. And then the mongoose story 
came to my mind. " They were not real diamonds," 
I said. " But then the man wasn't a real company 
promoter." 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

Two hundred years is not a long time to look back 
upon in the history of Yardley Parva: but it must 
have been about two hundred years ago that there 
were in the High Street some houses of distinction. 
They belonged to noblemen who had also mansions 
in the county, but who were too sociable and not 
sufficiently fond of books to be resigned to such iso- 
lation from their order as a mansion residence made 
compulsory. In the little town they were in touch 
with society of a sort: they could have their whist or 
piquet or faro with their own set every afternoon, 
and compare their thirsts at dinner later in the day. 

One of these modest residences of a ducal family 
faces the street to-day, after suffering many vicissi- 
tudes, but with the character of its facade unimpaired. 
The spacious ground-floor has been turned into shops 
— it would be more correct to say that the shops had 
been turned into the ground-floor, for structurally 
there has been no drastic removal of walls or beams. 
It has not been subjected to any violent evisceration, 
only to a minor gastric operation — say for appendi- 
citis. On the upper floors the beautiful proportions 
of the rooms remain uninjured, and the mantelpieces 
and the cornices have also been preserved. 

44 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 45 

The back of this house gives on to a part of the 
dry moat from which the screen-wall of our Castle 
rises, for Yardley had once a Castle of its own, and 
picturesque remnants of the Keep, the great gate- 
way, and the walls remain with us. Forty feet from 
the bed of the moat on this side the walls rise, and 
the moat must have been the site of the gardens of 
the ducal house, curving to right and left for a couple 
of hundred yards, and his lordship saw his chance for 
indulging in one of the most transfiguring fads of 
his day by making two high and broad terraces against 
the walls, thereby creating an imposing range of those 
hanging gardens that we hear so much of in old gar- 
dening books. The Oriental tradition of hanging 
gardens may have been brought to Europe with one 
of those wares of Orientalism that were the result of 
the later crusades; for assuredly at one time the re- 
ported splendours of Babylon, Nineveh, and Eck- 
batana in this direction were emulated by the great 
in many places of the West, where the need for the 
protection of the great Norman castles was begin- 
ning to wane, and the high, bare walls springing from 
the fosses, dry and flooded, looked gaunt and grim 
just where people wanted a more genial outlook. 

Powis Castle is the best example I can think of in 
this connection. No one who has seen the hanging 
gardens of these old walls can fail to appreciate how 
splendidly effective must have been the appearance 
of the terraces of Yardley when viewed from the moat 
below. But in the course of time, as the roads im- 
proved, making locomotion easier, the ducal mansion 



46 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

was abandoned in favour of another some miles nearer 
the coast, and the note of exclusiveness being gone 
from the shadow of the Castle walls, the terraces 
ceased to be cultivated ; the moat being on a level with 
the High Street, it became attractive as a site of every- 
day houses, until in the course of time there sprang 
up a row, and then a public-house or two, and cor- 
porate offices and law-courts that only required a 
hanging garden at assize times, when smugglers and 
highwaymen were found guilty of crimes that made 
such a place desirable — all these backed themselves 
into the moat until it had to be recognised as a public 
lane though a cul-de-sac as it is to-day. At the foot 
of the once beautiful terraces outhouses and stables 
were built as they were needed, with the happiest 
irregularity, but joined by a flint wall over which 
the straggling survivors of the trees and fruits of the 
days gone by hang skeleton branches. One doorway 
between two of the stables opens upon a fine stair- 
way made of solid blocks of Portland stone, leading 
into a gap in the screen-wall of the Castle, the ter- 
race being to right and left, and giving access to the 
grounds beyond, the appreciative possessor of which 
writes these lines. Sic transit gloria. Another stone 
stairway serves the same purpose at a different place ; 
but all the other ascents are of brick and probably 
only date back to the eighteenth century. They lead 
to some elevated but depressing chicken-runs. 

I called the attention of our chief local antiquarian 
to the succession of broad terraces and suggested their 
decorative origin. He shook his head and assured 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 47 

me that they were ages older than the ducal residence 
in the High Street. They belonged to the Norman 
period and were coeval with the Castle walls. When 
I told him that I was at a loss to know why the Nor- 
man builder should first raise a screen-wall forty feet 
up from a moat, to make it difficult for an enemy to 
scale, and then go to an amazing amount of trouble 
to make it easily accessible to quite a large attacking 
force by a long range of terraces, he smiled the smile 
of the local antiquarian — a kindly toleration of the 
absurdities of the tyro — saying, — 

"My dear sir, they would not mind such an attack. 
They could always repel it by throwing stones down 
from the top — it's ten feet thick there — yes, heavy 
stones, and melted lead, and boiling water." 

I did not want to throw cold water upon his re- 
searches as to the defence of a mediaeval stronghold, 
so I thanked him for his information. He disclaimed 
all pretensions to exclusive knowledge, and said that 
he would be happy to tell me anything else that I 
wanted to learn about such things. 

I could not resist expressing my fear to him, as we 
were parting, that the Water Company would not 
sanction the domestic supply from the kitchen boiler 
being used outside the house for defensive purposes; 
but he stilled my doubts by an assurance that in those 
days there was no Water Company. This was well 
enough so far as it went, but when I asked where the 
Castle folk got their water if there was no Company 
to supply it, he was slightly staggered, I could see; 
but, recovering himself, he said there would certainly 



48 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

have been a Sussex dew-pond within the precincts, 
and, as every one knew, this was never known to dry- 
up. 

I did not say that in this respect they had something 
in common with local antiquarians ; but asked him if 
it was true that swallows spent the winter in the mud 
at the bottom of these ponds. He told me gravely 
that he doubted if this could be; for there was not 
enough mud in even the largest dew-pond to accom- 
modate all the swallows. So I saw that he was as 
sound a naturalist as he was an antiquarian. 

By the way, I wonder how White of Selborne got 
that idea about the swallows hibernating in the mud 
at the bottom of ponds. When so keen a naturalist 
as White could believe that, one feels tempted to ask 
what is truth, and if it really is to be found, as the 
swallows are not, at the bottom of a well. One could 
understand Dr. Johnson's crediting the swallow the- 
ory, and discrediting the story of the great earth- 
quake at Lisbon, for he had his own lines of credence 
and incredulity, and he was what somebody called " a 
harbitrary gent "; but for White to have accepted and 
promulgated such an absurdity is indeed an amazing 
thing. 

But, for that matter, who, until trustworthy evi- 
dence was forthcoming a few months ago, ever 
fancied that English swallows went as far south as 
the Cape of Good Hope? This is now, however, an 
established fact; but I doubt if White of Selborne 
would have accepted it, no matter what evidence was 
claimed for its accuracy. Several times when aboard 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 49 

ship off the Cape I have made pets of swallows that 
came to us and remained in the chief saloon so long 
as there was a fly to be found ; and once in the month 
of October, on the island of St. Helena, I watched 
the sudden appearance of a number of the same birds ; 
but it was never suggested that they had come from 
England. I think I have seen them at Madeira in 
the month of January, but I am not quite certain 
about my dates in regard to this island; but I know 
that when riding through Baines' Kloof in South 
Africa, quite early in January, swallows were flying 
about me in scores. 

What a pity it seems that people with a reputation 
for wisdom were for so long content to think of the 
swallows only as the messengers of a love poem: the 
** swallow sister — oh, fleet, sweet swallow," or the 
" swallow, swallow, flying, flying south " — instead of 
piling up data respecting the wonder of their ways! 
The same may be said of the nightingale, and may 
the Lord have mercy on the souls of those who say it ! 

Are we to be told to be ready to exchange Itylus 
for a celluloid tab with a date on it? or Keats's Ode 
for a corrected notation of the nightingale's trills? 
At the same time might not a poet now and again 
take to heart the final lines — the summing up of the 
next most beautiful Ode in the language — 

" Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty "? 

Every fact in Nature seems to me to lead in the 
direction of poetry, and to increase the wonder of 
that of which man is but an insignificant part. We 



50 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

are only beginning to know a little about the part 
we were designed to play in Nature, but the more we 
know the more surprised, and, indeed, alarmed, we 
must be when by a revelation its exact position is 
made known to us. We have not yet learned to live. 
We have been fools enough to cultivate the forgetting 
of how to do things that we were able to do thou- 
sands of years ago. The half of our senses have been 
atrophied. It is many years since we first began to 
take leave of our senses and we have been at it ever 
since. It is about time that we started recognising 
that an acquaintance with the facts of Nature is the 
beginning of wisdom. We crystallised our ignorance 
in phrases that have been passed on from father to 
son, and quoted at every opportunity. We refer to 
people being " blind as a bat," and to others being — 
as " bold as a lion," or " harmless as a dove." Did 
it never strike the inventor of any of these similes 
that it would be well before scattering them abroad 
to find out if they were founded on fact? The eye- 
sight of the bat is a miracle. How such a creature 
can get a living for the whole year during the sum- 
mer months is amazing. The lion is a cowardly brute 
that runs away yelling at the sight of a rhinoceros 
and submits without complaint to the insults of the 
elephant. A troop of doves will do more harm to 
a wheat-field in an hour than does a thunderstorm. 

And the curious thing is that in those quarters 
where one would expect to find wisdom respecting 
such incidents of Nature one finds foolishness. Ten 
centuries of gamekeepers advertise their ignorance in 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 51 

documentary evidence nailed to the barn doors; they 
have been slaughtering their best friends all these 
years and they continue doing so. 

After formulating this indictment I opened my 
Country Life, and found in its pages a confirmation 
of my evidence by my friend F. C. G., who is prov- 
ing himself in his maturity as accomplished a Natur- 
alist as, in his adolescence, he was a caricaturist in the 
Westminster Gazette. These are his lines: — 



THE GAMEKEEPER'S GIBBET 

Two stoats, a weasel, and a jay, 

In varied stages of decay, 

Are hanging on the gibbet-tree 

For all the woodland folk to see, 

And tattered rags swing to and fro 

Remains of what was once a crow. 

What were their crimes that when they died 

The Earth was not allowed to hide 

Their mangled corpses out of sight, 

Instead of dangling in the light? 

They didn't sin against the Law 

Of " Nature red in tooth and claw," 

But 'gainst the edicts of the keeper 

Who plays the part of Death the Reaper, 

And doth with deadly gun determine 

What creatures shall be classed as vermin. 

Whether we gibbets find, or grace, 

Depends on accident of place, 

For what is vice in Turkestan 

May be a virtue in Japan. 

F. C. G. 



52 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

And what about gardeners? Why, quite recently 
I was solemnly assured by one of the profession that 
I should " kill without mercy " — those were his words 
— every frog or toad I found in a greenhouse! 

But for that matter, don't we remember the harsh" 
decrees of our pastors and masters when as children 
we yielded to an instinct that had not yet been atro- 
phied, and slaughtered all the flies that approached us. 
I remember that, after a perceptor's reasoning with 
me through the medium of a superannuated razor- 
strop, I was told that to kill a bluebottle was a sin. 
Now science has come to the rescue of the new gen- 
eration from the consequences of the ignorance of the 
old, and the boy who kills most flies in the course of 
a season is handsomely rewarded. What is pro- 
nounced a sin in one generation is looked on as a vir- 
tue in the next. 

I recollect seeing it stated in a Zoology for the Use 
of Schools, compiled by an F.R.S., with long quota- 
tions from Milton at the head of every chapter, that 
the reason why some fishes of the Tropics were so 
gorgeously coloured was to enable them to be more 
easily seen by the voracious enemy that was pursu- 
ing them. That was why God had endowed the glow- 
worm with his glow — to give him a better chance of 
attracting the attention of the nightingale or any 
other bird that did not go to roost before dark ! And 
God had also given the firefly its spark that it might 
display its hospitality to the same birds that had been 
entertained by the glow-worm! My informant had 
not mastered the alphabet of Nature. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 53 

Long after I had tried to see things through Dar- 
win's eyes I was perplexed by watching a cat trying 
to get the better of a sparrow in the garden. I no- 
ticed that every time it had crouched to make its 
pounce the cat waved its tail. Why on earth it should 
try to make itself conspicuous in this way when it was 
flattening itself into the earth that was nearest to it 
in colour, and writhing towards its prey, seemed to 
me remarkable. Once, however, I was able to watch 
the cat approach when I was seated beyond where 
the sparrow was digging up worms, and the cat had 
slipped among the lower boughs of an ash covered 
with trembling leaves. 

There among the trembling leaves I saw another 
trembling leaf — the soothing, swaying end of my 
cat's tail; but if I had not known that it was there 
I should not have noticed it apart from the moving 
leaves. The bird with all its vigilance was deceived, 
and it was in the cat's jaws in another moment. 

And I had been calling that cat — and, incidentally, 
Darwin — a fool for several years! I do not know 
what my Zoologist " for the Use of Schools " would 
have made of the transaction. Would he have said 
that a cat abhorred the sin of lying, and scorned to 
take advantage of the bird, but gave that graceful 
swing to its tail to make the bird aware of its men- 
acing proximity? 

I lived for eleven years in a house in Kensington 
with quite a spacious garden behind it, and was blest 
for several years by the company of a pair of black- 
birds that made their nest among the converging twigs 



54 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

of a high lilac. No cat could climb that tree in spring, 
as I perceived when I had watched the frustrated at- 
tempts of the splendid blue Persian who was my con- 
stant companion. Of course I lived in that garden 
for hours every day during the months of April, May, 
June, and July, and we guarded the nest very closely, 
even going so far as to disturb the balance of Nature 
by sending the cat away on a visit when the young 
birds were being fledged. But one month of May 
arrived, and though I noticed the parent blackbirds 
occasionally among the trees and shrubs, I never once 
saw them approaching the old nest, which, as in pre- 
vious seasons, was smothered out of sight in the fol- 
iage about it, for a poplar towered above the lilac, 
and was well furnished. 

I remarked to my man that I was afraid our black- 
birds had deserted us this year, and he agreed with 
me. But one day early in June I saw the cat look 
wistfully up the lilac. 

" He hasn't forgotten the nest that was there," I 
said. " But I'm sure he'll find out in which of the 
neighbouring gardens the new one has been built." 

But every day he came out and gazed up as if into 
the depths of the foliage above our heads. 

" Ornithology is his hobby," said I, " but he's not 
so smart as I fancied, or he would be hustling around 
the other gardens where he should know murder can 
be done with impunity." 

The next day my man brought out a pair of steps, 
and placing them firmly under the lilac, ascended to 
the level of where the nest had been in former years. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 55 

At once there came the warning chuckle of the black- 
birds from the boughs of the poplar. 

" Why, bless my soul ! There are four young ones 
in the nest, and they're nearly ready to fly," sang out 
the investigator from above, and the parents cor- 
roborated every word from the poplar. 

I was amazed. It seemed impossible that I could 
have sat writing under that tree day after day for two 
months, watching for signs that the birds were there, 
and yet fail to notice them at their work either of 
hatching or feeding. It was not carelessness or in- 
difference they had eluded; it was vigilance. I had 
looked daily for their coming, and there was no fine 
day in which I was not in the garden for four hours, 
practically immovable, and the nest was not more 
than ten feet from the ground, yet I had remained 
in ignorance of all that was going on above my head ! 

With such an experience I do not think that it 
becomes me to sneer too definitely at the stupidity 
of gamekeepers or farmers. It is when I read as I 
do from week to week in Country Life of the labor- 
ious tactics of those photographers who have brought 
us into closer touch with the secret life of birds than 
all the preceding generations of naturalists succeeded 
in doing, that I feel more charitably disposed toward 
the men who mistake friends for foes in the air. 

Every year I give prizes to the younger members 
of our household to induce them to keep their eyes 
and their ears open to their fellow-creatures who may 
be seen and heard at times. The hearing of the 
earliest cuckoo meets with its reward, quite apart 



56 - A GARDEN OF PEACE 

from the gratifying of an aesthetic sense by the quot- 
ing of Wordsworth. The sighting of the first swal- 
lows is quoted somewhat lower on the chocolate ex- 
change, but the market recovers almost to a point 
of buoyancy on hearing the nightingale. The cuckoo 
is an uncertain customer and requires some looking 
after; but the swallows are marvellously punctual. 
We have never seen them in our neighbourhood be- 
fore April the nineteenth. For five years the Twenty- 
first is recorded as their day. The nightingale does 
not visit our garden, which is practically in the middle 
of the town ; but half a mile away one is heard almost 
every year. Upon one happy occasion it was seen as 
well as heard, which constituted a standard of recog- 
nition not entertained before. 

I asked for an opinion of the bird from the two 
girls who had had this stroke of luck. 

Each took a different standpoint in regard to its 
attainments. 

" I never heard anything so lovely in all my life," 
said Rosamund, aged ten. " It made you long to — 
to — I don't know what. It was lovely." 

" And what was your opinion, Olive? " I asked of 
the second little girl. 

My Olive branch looked puzzled for a few min- 
utes, but she had the sense to perceive that compara- 
tive criticism is safe, when a departure from the 
beaten track is contemplated. Her departure was 
parabolic. 

" I didn't think it half as pretty a bird as Miss 
Midleton's parrot," she said with conviction. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 57 

Miss Midleton's parrot is a gorgeous conglomera- 
tion of crimson and blue, like the 'at of 'arriet, that 
should be looked at through smoked glasses and heard 
not at all. 

I think that I shall have Olive educated to take her 
place in a poultry run; while Rosamund looks after 
the rose garden. 

• •••••• 

My antiquary came to me early on the day after 
I had asked him for information about the hanging 
gardens. 

" I've been talking to my friend Thompson on the 
subject of those hanging gardens of the Duke's," said 
he; " and I thought that you would like to hear what 
he says. He agrees with me — I fancied he would. 
The Duke had no power to hang any one in his gar- 
dens, Thompson says ; and even if he had the power, 
the pear-trees that we see there now weren't big 
enough to hang a man on." 

" A man — a man! My dear sir, I wasn't thinking 
of his hanging men there: it was clothes — clothes — 
linen — pants — shirts — pajamas, and the like." 

" Oh, that's quite another matter," said he. 

I agreed with him. 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

In a foregoing page I brought those who are ready 
to submit to my guidance up to the boundary wall of 
my Garden of Peace by the stone staircases sloping 
between the terraces of the old hanging gardens of 
the Castle moat. With apologies for such a furtive 
approach I hasten to admit them through the entrance 
that is in keeping with their rank and station. I bow 
them through the Barbican Entrance, which is of it- 
self a stately tower, albeit on the threshold of mod- 
ernity, having been built in the reign of Edward II., 
really not more than six hundred years ago. I feel 
inclined to apologise for mentioning this structure of 
yesterday when I bring my friends on a few yards to 
the real thing — the true Castle gateway, gloriously 
gaunt and grim, with the grooves for the portcullis 
and the hinges on which the iron-barbed gate once 
swung. There is no suggestion in its architecture of 
that effeminacy of the Perpendicular Period, which 
may be seen in the projecting parapet of the Barbi- 
can, pierced to allow of the molten lead of my an- 
tiquary being ladled out over the enemy who has not 
been baffled by the raising of the drawbridge. Molten 
lead is well enough in its way, and no doubt, when 
brought up nice and warm from the kitchen, and al- 

58 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 59 

lowed to drop through the apertures, it was more or 
less irritating as it ran off the edge of the helmets 
below and began to trickle down the backs of an 
attacking party. The body-armour was never skin- 
tight, and molten lead has had at all times an annoy- 
ing way of rinding out the joinings in a week-day coat 
of mail; we know how annoying the drip of a neigh- 
bour's umbrella can be when it gets through the de- 
fence of one's mackintosh collar and meanders down 
one's back. — No, not a word should be said against 
molten lead as a sedative; but even its greatest ad- 
mirers must allow that as a medium of discourage- 
ment to an enemy of ordinary sensitiveness it lacked 
the robustness of the falling Rock. 

The Decorative note of the Perpendicular period 
may have been in harmony with such trifling as is 
incidental to molten lead, but the stern and uncom- 
promising Early Norman gate would defend itself 
only with the Rock. That was its character; and 
when a few hundredweight of solid unsculptured stone 
were dropped from its machicolated parapet upon 
the armed men who were fiddling with the lock of the 
gate below, the people in the High Street could hardly 
have heard themselves chatting across that thorough- 
fare on account of the noise, and tourists must have 
fancied that there was a boiler or two being repaired 
by a conscientious staff anxious to break the riveting 
record. 

Everything remains of the Castle gateway except 
the Gate. The structure is some forty feet high and 
twelve feet thick. The screen- wall was joined to it 



60 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

on both sides, and when you pass under the arch and 
through a more humble doorway in the wall you are 
at the entrance to my Garden of Peace. 

This oaken door has a little history of its own. For 
several years after I came to Yardley Parva I used 
to stand opposite to it in one of the many narrow lanes 
leading to the ramparts of the town. I knew that the 
building to which it belonged, and where some humble 
industry was carried on, embodied the ancient church 
of Ste. Ursula-in-Foro. The stone doorway is illus- 
trated in an old record of the town, and I saw where 
the stone had been worn away by the Crusaders sharp- 
ening the barbs of their arrows on it for luck. I had 
three carefully thought-out plans for acquiring this 
door and doorway; but on consideration I came to the 
conclusion that they were impracticable, unless an- 
other Samson were to come among us with all the ex- 
perience of his Gaza feat. 

I had ceased to pass through that ancient lane; it 
had become too much for me ; when suddenly I noticed 
building operations going on at the place; a Cinema 
palace was actually being constructed on the conse- 
crated site of the ancient church! Happily the door 
and the doorway were not treated as material for the 
housebreaker; they were removed into the cellar of 
the owner of the property, and from him they were 
bought by me for a small sum — much less than I 
should have had to pay for the shaped stones alone. 
The oak door I set in the wall of my house, and the 
doorway I brought down my garden where it now 
features as an arch spanning one of the paths. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 61 

But my good fortune did not end here; for a few 
years later a fine keystone with a sculptured head of 
Ste. Ursula was dug up in the little garden behind 
the site of the tiny church, and was presented to me 
with the most important fragments of two deeply- 
carved capitals such as one now and again sees at the 
entrance to a Saxon Church ; and so at last these pre- 
cious relics of mediaeval piety are joined together after 
a disjunctive interval of perhaps five or six hundred 
years, and, moreover, on a spot not more than a few 
hundred feet from where they had originally been 
placed. 

Sir Martin Conway told some years ago of his re- 
markable discovery in the grounds of an English 
country house, of one of the missing capitals of Theo- 
docius, with its carved acanthus leaves blown by the 
wind and the monogram of Theodocius himself. A 
more astounding discovery than this can hardly be 
imagined. No one connected with it was able to say 
how it found its way to the place where it caught the 
eye of a trustworthy antiquarian; and this fact sug- 
gested to me the advisability of attaching an engraved 
label to such treasure trove, giving their history as far 
as is known to the possessors. The interest attaching 
to them would be thereby immensely increased, and it 
would save much useless conjecture on the part of 
members of Antiquarian Societies. Some people seem 
to think that paying a subscription to an Antiquarian 
Society makes one a fully qualified antiquarian, just 
as some people fancy that being a Royal Academician 
makes one a good painter. 



62 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

The great revival in this country in the taste for 
the Formal Garden and the Dutch Garden has 
brought about the introduction of an immense number 
of sculptured pieces of decoration; and one feels that 
in the course of time our gardens will be as well fur- 
nished in this way as those of Italy. The well-heads 
of various marbles, with all the old ironwork that one 
sees nowadays in the yards of the importers, are as 
amazing as the number of exquisite columns for per- 
golas, garden seats of the most imposing character, 
vases of bronze as well as stone or marble, and wall 
fountains. And I have no doubt that the importers 
would make any purchaser acquainted with the place 
of origin of most of these. Of course we know pretty 
well by now where so many of the treasures of the 
Villa Borghese are to be found; but there are hun- 
dreds of other pieces of sixteenth and seventeenth 
century Italian work that arrive in England, and 
quite as many that go to the United States, without 
any historical record attached to them. I do hope 
that the buyers of these lovely things will see how 
greatly their value and the interest attaching to them 
would be increased by such memoranda of their 
origin. 

The best symbol of Peace is a ploughshare that 
was once a sword ; and surely a garden that has been 
made in the Tiltyard of a Norman Castle may be 
looked on as an emblem of the same Beatitude. That 
is how it comes that every one who enters our garden 
cries, — 

" How wonderfully peaceful ! " 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 63 

I have analysed their impression that forces them 
to say that. The mild bustle of the High Street of 
a country town somehow imposes itself upon one, for 
the simple reason that you can hear it and observe it. 
The bustle of London is something quite different. 
One is not aware of it. You cannot see the wood for 
the trees. It is all a wild roar. But when our High 
Street is at its loudest you can easily distinguish one 
sound from another. 

Then the constant menace of motor-cars rushing 
through the High Street leaves an impression that 
does not vanish the moment one turns into the passage 
of the barbican; and upon it comes the sight of the 
defensive masonry, which is quite terrific for the mo- 
ment; then comes the looming threat of the Norman 
gateway which gives promise of no compromise! It 
is not necessary that one should have a particularly 
vivid imagination to hear the clash and clang of arm- 
oured men riding forth with lances and battleaxes; 
and when one steps aside out of their way, the rest is 
silence and the silence is rest. 

" How wonderfully peaceful! " every one cries. 

And so it is. 

You can hear the humming of a bee — the flick of a 
swallow's wing, the tinkle of the fountain — a delight- 
ful sound like the counting out of the threepenny 
pieces in the Church Vestry after a Special Collec- 
tion — and the splash of a blackbird in its own partic- 
ular bath. These are the sounds that cause the silence 
to startle you. " Darkness visible," is Milton's phrase. 
But to make an adaptation of it is not enough to ex- 



64 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

press what one feels on entering a walled garden from 
a street even of a country town. There is an out- 
break of silence the moment the door is closed, and 
it is in a hushed tone that one says, when one is able 
to speak, — 

" How wonderfully peaceful! " 

I think that a garden is not a garden unless it is 
walled. Perhaps a high hedge of yew or box conveys 
the same impression as a built-up wall; but I am not 
quite certain on this point. The impression has re- 
mained with us since the days when an Englishman's 
home was his castle and an Englishman's castle his 
home. What every one sought was security, and a 
consciousness of security only came when one was 
within walls. In going through a country of wild 
animals one has a kindred feeling when the fire is 
lighted at nightfall. Another transmitted instinct is 
that which forces one to look backward on a road 
when the sound of steps tells one that one is being 
followed. The earliest English gardens of which any 
record remains were walled. In the illustrations to 
the Romaunt of the Rose, we see this; and possibly 
the maze became a feature of the garden in order to 
increase the sense of security from the knife of an 
enemy whose slaughter had been overlooked by the 
mediaeval horticultural enthusiast, who sought for 
peace and quiet on Prussian principles. 

I think it was the appearance of the walls that 
forced me to buy my estate of a superficial acre. Cer- 
tainly until I saw them I had no idea of such a pur- 
chase. If any one had told me on that morning when 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 05 

I strolled up the High Street of Yardley Parva while 
the battery of my car was being re-charged after the 
manner of those pre-magneto times, that I should take 
such a step I would have laughed. But it was a day 
of August sunshine and there was an auction of fur- 
niture going on in the house. This fact gave me en- 
tree to the " old-world garden " of the agent's adver- 
tisement, and when I saw the range of walls ablaze 
with many-coloured snapdragons above the double 
row of hollyhocks in the border at their foot, I " found 
peace," as the old Revivalists used to phrase the senti- 
ment, only their assurance was of a title to a mansion 
in the skies, while I was less ambitious. I sought 
peace and ensued it, purchasing the freehold, and I 
have been ensuing it ever since. 

The mighty walls of the old Castle compass us 
about as they did the various dwellers within their 
shelter eight hundred years ago. On one side they 
vary from twelve feet to thirty in height, but on the 
outer side they rise from the moat and loom from 
forty to fifty feet above the lowest of the terraces. 
At one part, where a Saxon earthwork makes a long 
curved hillock at the farther end of the grounds, the 
wall is only ten feet above the grassy walk, but forty 
feet down on the other side. The Norman Conqueror 
simply built his wall resting against the mound of 
the original and more elementary fortification. Here 
the line of the screen breaks off abruptly; but we can 
see that at one time it was carried on to an artificial 
hill on the summit of which the curious feature of a 
second keep was built — the well-preserved main keep 



66 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

forms an imposing incident of the landscape in the 
opposite direction. 

The small plateau which was once enclosed by the 
screen-wall is not more than three acres in extent; 
from its elevation of a couple of hundred feet it over- 
looks the level country and the shallow river-way for 
many miles — a tranquil landscape of sylvan beauty 
dominated by the everlasting Downs. Almost to the 
very brink of the lofty banks of the plateau on one 
side we have an irregular bowling-green, bordered by 
a row of pollard ashes. From a clause in one of my 
title deeds I find that three hundred years ago the 
bowling-green was in active existence and played a 
useful part as a landmark in the delimitation of 
the frontier. It is brightly green at all seasons; 
and the kindly neighbouring antiquarian confided 
in me how its beauty was attained and is main- 
tained. 

" Some time ago an American tourist asked the man 
who was mowing it how it came to be such a fine green, 
and says the man, ' Why, it's as easy as snuffling : all 
you've got to do is to lay it down with good turf at 
first and keep on cutting it for three or four hundred 
years and the thing is done.' Smart of the fellow, 
wasn't it? " 

" It was very smart," I admitted. 

Our neighbour showed his antiquarian research in 
another story as well as in this one. It related to the 
curate of a local parish who, in the unavoidable ab- 
sence of his vicar, who was a Rural Dean, found him- 
self taking a timid breakfast with the Bishop of the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 67 

Diocese. He was naturally a shy man and he was 
shying very highly over an egg that he had taken and 
that was making a very hearty appeal to him. Ob- 
serving him, the Bishop, with a thorough knowledge 
of his Diocese, and being well aware that the elec- 
toral contest which had been expected a few months 
earlier had not taken place, turned to the curate and 
remarked 

But if you've heard the story before what he re- 
marked will not appeal to you so strongly as the egg 
did to the clergyman; so there is nothing gained by 
repeating the remark or the response intoned by the 
curate. 

But when our antiquarian told us both we heartily 
agreed with him that that curate deserved to be a 
bishop. 

We are awaiting without impatience, I trust, the 
third of this Troika team of anecdotes — the one that 
refers to the Scotsman and Irishman who came to 
the signpost that told all who couldn't read to inquire 
at the blacksmith's. That story is certain to be re- 
vealed to us in time. The antiquarian from the stable 
of whose memory the other two of the team were let 
loose cannot possibly restrain the third. 

Such things are pleasantly congenial with the scent 
of lavender in an old-world garden that knows noth- 
ing of how busy people are in the new world outside 
its boundary. But what are we to say when we find 
in a volume of serious biography published last year 
only as a previously unheard-of instance of the wit 
of the " subject," the story of the gentleman who, 



68 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

standing at the entrance to his club, was taken for 
the porter by a member coming out? 

" Call me a cab," said the latter. 

" You're a cab," was the prompt reply. 

The story in the biography stops there; but the 
original one shows the wit making a second score on 
punning points. 

" What do you mean? " cried the other. " I told 
you to call me a cab." 

" And I've called you a cab. You didn't expect 
me to call you handsome," said the ready respondent. 

Now that story was a familiar Strand story forty 
years ago when H. J. Byron was at the height of his 
fame, and he was made the hero of the pun (assum- 
ing that it is possible for a hero to make a pun) . 

But, of course, no one can vouch for the mint from 
which such small coin issues. If a well-known man is 
in the habit of making puns all the puns of his gen- 
eration are told in the next with his name attached 
to them. H. J. Byron was certainly as good a pun- 
ster as ever wrote a burlesque for the old Gaiety; 
though a good deal of the effect of his puns was due 
to their delivery by Edward Terry. But nothing that 
Byron wrote was so good as Burnand's title to his 
Burlesque on Rob Roy, the play which Mrs Bateman 
had just revived at Sadler's Wells. Burnand called 
it Robbing Roy, or Scotched, not Kilt. The parody 
on " Roy's Wife," sung by Terry, was exquisite, and 
very topical, — 

" Roy's wife of Alldivalloch ! 
Roy's wife of Alldivalloch ! 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 69 

Oh, while she 
Is wife to me, 
Is life worth living, Mr. Mallock?" 

Mr. Mallock's book was being widely discussed in 
those days, and Punch had his pun on it with the 
rest. 

" Is Life worth living? " " It depends on the 
liver." 

The Garrick Club stories of Byron, Gilbert, and 
Burnand were innumerable. To the first-named was 
attributed the dictum that a play was like a cigar. 
" If it was a good one all your friends wanted a box ; 
but if it was a bad one no amount of puffing would 
make it draw." 

The budding litterateurs of those days — and nights 
— used to go from hearing stories of Byron's latest, 
to the Junior Garrick to hear Byron make up fresh 
ones about old Mrs. Swanborough of the Strand 
Theatre. Some of them were very funny. Mrs. Swan- 
borough was a clever old lady with whom I was ac- 
quainted when I was very young. She never gave 
utterance to the things Byron tacked on to her. I 
recollect how amused I was to hear Byron's stories 
about her told to me by Arthur Swanborough about 
an old lady who had just retired from the stage, and 
then, passing on to Orme Square on a Sunday eve- 
ning, to hear " Johnny Toole," as he was to the very 
youngest of us, tell the same stories about a dear old 
girl who was still in his company at the Folly Theatre. 

So much for the circulation of everyday anecdotes. 
Dean Swift absorbed most of the creations of the early 



70 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

eighteenth century; then Dr. Johnson became the 
father of as many as would fill a volume. Theodore 
Hook, Tom Hood, Shirley Brooks, Albert Smith, 
Mark Lemon, and several others whose names convey 
little to the present generation, were the reputed par- 
ents of the puns which enlivened the great Victorian 
age. But if a scrupulous historian made up his mind 
to apply for a paternity order against any one of 
these gay dogs, that historian would have difficulty 
in bringing forward sufficient evidence to have it 
granted. 

The late Mr. M. A. Robertson, of the Treaty De- 
partment of the Foreign Office, told me that his 
father — the celebrated preacher known to fame as 
" Robertson of Brighton " — had described to him the 
important part played by the pun in the early sixties. 
At a dinner-party at which the Reverend Mr. Rob- 
ertson was a guest, a humorist who was present 
picked up the menu card and set the table on a roar 
with his punning criticism of every plat. Robertson 
thought that such a spontaneous effort was a very 
creditable tour de force — doubtless the humorist 
would have called it a tour de farce — but a few nights 
later he was at another party which was attended by 
the same fellow-guest, and once again the menu, 
which happened to be exactly the same also, was 
casually picked up and dealt with seriatim as before, 
with an equally hilarious effect. He mentioned to the 
hostess as a curious coincidence that he should find 
her excellent dinner identical with the one of which 
he had partaken at the other house ; and then she con- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 71 

fided in him that the great punster had given her the 
bill of fare that afforded him his opportunity of dis- 
playing his enlivening trick ! Robertson gave me the 
name of this Victorian artist, but there is no need for 
me to reveal it in this place. The story, however, 
allows us a glimpse into the studio of one of the word- 
jugglers of other days; and when one has been made 
aware of the machinery of his mysteries, one ceases 
to marvel. 

Two brothers, Willie and Oscar Wilde, earned 
many dinners in their time by their conversational 
abilities ; and I happen to know that before going out 
together they rehearsed very carefully the exchange 
of their impromptus at the dinner table. Both of 
these brothers were brilliant conversationalists, and 
possessed excellent memories. They were equally 
unscrupulous and unprincipled. The only psycho- 
logical distinction between the two was that the elder, 
Willie, possessed an impudence of a quality which 
was not among Oscar's gifts. Oscar was impudent 
enough to take his call on the first night of Lady 
Windermere's Fan smoking a cigarette, and to assure 
the audience that he had enjoyed the play immensely; 
but he was never equal to his brother in this special 
line. Willie was a little over twenty and living with 
his parents in Dublin, where he had a friendly little 
understanding with a burlesque actress who was the 
principal boy in the pantomime at the Gaiety 
Theatre. She wrote to him one day making an ap- 
pointment with him for the night, and asking him 
to call for her at the stage door. The girl addressed 



72 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the letter to " Wm. Wilde, Esq.," at his home, and 
as his father's name was William he opened it me- 
chanically and read it. He called Willie into his 
study after breakfast and put the letter before him, 
crying, "Read that, sir!" 

The son obeyed, folded it up and handed it back, 
saying quietly, — 

" Well, dad, do you intend to go? " 

To obtain ready cash and good dinners, Willie 
Wilde, when on the staff of a great London news- 
paper, was ready to descend to any scheming and any 
meanness. But the descriptive column that he wrote 
of the sittings of the Parnell Commission day after 
day could not be surpassed for cleverness and in- 
sight. He would lounge into the Court at any time 
he pleased and remain for an hour or so, rarely 
longer, and he spent the rest of the day amusing him- 
self and flushing himself with brandies and soda at 
the expense of his friends. He usually began to 
write his article between eleven and twelve at night. 

Such were these meteoric brothers before the cen- 
trifugal force due to their revolutionary instinct sent 
them flying into space. 

But one handful of the meteoric dust of the con- 
versation of either was worth all the humour of the 
great Victorian punsters. 



CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

From the foregoing half-dozen pages it is becoming 
pretty clear that a Garden of Peace may also be 
a Garden of Memories. But I am sure that one of 
the greatest attractions of garden life to a man who 
has stepped out of a busy world — its strepitumque 
mrumque, is that it compels him to look forward, 
while permitting him to look back. The very act of 
dropping a seed into the soil is prospective. To see 
things growing is stimulating, whether they are chil- 
dren or other flowers. One has no time to think how 
one would order one's career, avoiding the mistakes 
of the past, if one got a renewal of one's lease of life, 
for in a garden we are ever planning for the future; 
but these rustling leaves of memory are useful as a 
sort of mulch for the mind. 

And the garden has certainly grown since I first 
entered it ten years ago. It was originally to be re- 
ferred to in the singular, but now it must be thought 
of in the plural. It was a garden, now it is gardens; 
and whether I have succeeded or not my experience 
compels me to believe that to aim at the plural makes 
for success. Two gardens, each of thirty feet square, 
are infinitely better than one garden of sixty. I am 
sure of that to-day, but it took me some time to find 

73 



74 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

it out. A garden to be distinctive must have distinct 
features, like every other thing of life. 

I notice that most writers on garden-making begin 
by describing what a wilderness their place was when 
they first took it in hand. I cannot maintain that 
tradition. Mine had nothing of the wilderness about 
it. On the contrary, it was just too neat for my 
taste. The large lawn on to which some of the lower 
rooms of the house opened, had broad paths on each 
side and a broad flower border beyond. There was 
not a shrub on the lawn and only one tree — a majestic 
deodar spreading itself abroad at an angle of the 
nearest wing of the house; but on a knoll at the far- 
ther end of the lawn there were, we discovered next 
summer, pink and white mays, a wild cherry, and a 
couple of laburnums, backed by a towering group 
made up of sycamores and chestnuts. Such a plan of 
planting could not be improved upon, I felt certain, 
though I did not discuss it at the time ; for I was not 
out to make an alteration, and my attention was 
wholly occupied with the appearance of the ancient 
walls, glorious with snapdragon up to the lilacs that 
made a coping of colour for the whole high range, 
while the lower brick boundary opposite was covered 
with pears and plums clasping hands in espalier form 
from end to end. 

But I was not sure about the flower borders which 
contained alternate clumps of pink geraniums and 
white daisies. Perhaps they were too strongly remi- 
niscent of the window-boxes of the Cromwell Road 
through which I had walked every day for nearly 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 75 

twenty years, and in time one grows weary even of 
the Cromwell Road! 

But so well did the accident of one elbow of the 
wall of the bowling-green pushing itself out lend 
itself to the construction of the garden, that the first 
and most important element in garden-design was 
attained. This, I need hardly say, is illusion and sur- 
prise. One fancied that here the limits of the ground 
had been reached, for a fine deciduous oak seemed to 
block the way; but with investigation one found 
oneself at the entrance to a new range of grounds 
which, though only about three times as large as the 
first, seemed almost illimitable. 

The greater part had at one time been an orchard, 
we could see ; but the trees had been planted too close 
to one another, and after thirty or forty years of 
jostling, had ceased to be of any pictorial or com- 
mercial value, and I saw that these would have to 
go. Beyond there was a kitchen garden and a large 
glass-house, and on one side there was a long curve 
of grass terrace made out of the Saxon or Roman 
earthwork, against which, as I have already said, the 
Norman walls were built, showing only about twelve 
or fifteen feet above the terrace, while being forty 
or fifty down to the dry moat outside. This low 
mural line was a mass of antirrhinums, wallflowers, 
and such ferns as thrive in rock crevices. 

There was abviously not much to improve in all 
this. We were quite satisfied with everything as it 
stood. There was nothing whatsoever of the wilder- 
ness that we could cause to blossom as the rose, only 



76 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

— not a rose was to be seen in any part of the 
garden ! 

We were conscious of the want, for our Kensington 
garden had been a mass of roses, and we were ready 
to join on to Victor Hugo's " TJne maison sans 
enfants" te un jardin sans roses.' 3 But we were not 
troubled; roses are as easily to be obtained as bram- 
bles — in fact rather more easily — and we had only to 
make up our minds where to plant them and they 
would blush all over the place the next summer. 

We had nothing to complain of but much to be 
thankful for, when, after being in the house for a 
month, I found the old gardener, whom we had taken 
over with the place, wheeling his barrow through a 
doorway which I knew led to a dilapidated potting- 
shed, and as I saw that the barrow was laden with 
rubbish I had the curiosity to follow him to see where 
he should dispose of it. 

He went through a small iron gate in the wall 
alongside the concealed potting-house, and, following 
him, I found myself to my amazement in a small 
walled space, forty feet by thirty, containing rubbish, 
but giving every one with eyes to see such a picture 
of the Barbican, the Castle Gate with the Keep 
crowning the mound beyond, as made me shout — such 
a picture as was not to be found in the county! 

If it had a fault at all it was to be found in its 
perfection. Every one has, I hope, seen the Sham 
Castle, the castellated gateway, built on Hampton 
Down, near Bath, to add picturesqueness to the pros- 
pect as seen from the other side. This is as perfectly 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 77 

made a ruin as ever was built up by stage carpenters. 
There was no reason why it should not be so, for it 
was easy to put a stone in here and there if an im- 
provement were needed, or to dilapidate a bit of a 
tower until the whole would meet with the approval 
even of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who are, I 
am given to understand, the best informed authorities 
in England on the assessment of dilapidations. I 
must confess that the first glimpse I had of the pic- 
ture that stood before my eyes above my newly- 
acquired rubbish-heaps suggested the perfection of 
a sham. The mise-en-scene seemed too elaborate — 
too highly finished — no detail that could add to the 
effect being absent. But there it was, and I remained 
looking at it for the rest of the day. 

The over-conscientious agents had said not a word 
in the inventory of the most valuable asset in connec- 
tion with the property. They had scrupulously ad- 
vertised the " unique and valuable old-fashioned resi- 
dence," and the fact that it was partially " covered 
by creepers " — a partiality to which I was not very 
partial — and that the " billiard saloon " had the same 
advantages — they had not failed to allude to the gar- 
dens as " old-world and quaint," but not one word 
had they said about this view from the well-matured 
rubbish-heaps! 

It was at this point that I began to think about 
improvements, and the first essay in this direction 
was obvious. I had the rubbish removed, the ground 
made straight, a stone sundial placed in the centre, 
and a Dutch pattern of flower-beds cut around it. 



78 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

On the coping of the walls — they were only six feet 
high on our side, but forty on the outside — I placed 
lead and stone vases and a balustrade of wrought 
iron-work. I made an immense window in the wall 
of the potting-shed — a single sheet of plate-glass with 
four small casements of heraldic stained glass; and 
then the old potting-shed I panelled in coloured mar- 
bles, designed a sort of domed roof for it and laid 
down a floor in mosaics. I had in my mind a room 
in the Little Trianon in all this; and I meant to treat 
the view outside as a picture set in one wall. Of 
course I did not altogether succeed; but I have gone 
sufficiently far to deceive more than one visitor. 
Entering the room through a mahogany door set with 
a round panel of beautifully-clouded onyx — once a 
table-top in the gay George's pavilion at Brighton — 
a visitor sees the brass frame of the large window en- 
closing the picture of the Barbican, the Gateway, and 
the Keep, and it takes some moments to under- 
stand it. 

All this sounds dreadfully expensive; but through 
finding a really intelligent builder and men who were 
ready to do all that was asked of them, and, above 
all, through having abundance of material collected 
wherever it was going at shillings instead of pounds, 
I effected the transformation at less than a sixth of the 
lowest assessment of the cost made by professional 
friends. To relieve myself from any vain charge of 
extravagance, I may perhaps be permitted to mention 
that when the property was offered for sale in Lon- 
don a week before I bought it, not a single bid was 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 79 

made for it, owing to an apparent flaw in one of the 
title-deeds frightening every one off. Thus, without 
knowing it, I arrived on the scene at the exact psy- 
chological moment — for a purchaser ; and when I got 
the place I found myself with a considerable sum in 
hand to spend upon it, and that sum has not yet been 
all spent. The bogey fault in the title was made good 
by the exchange of a few letters, and it is now abso- 
lutely unassailable. 

It must also be remembered by such people as may 
be inclined to talk of extravagance, that it is very 
good business to spend a hundred pounds on one's 
property if the property is thereby increased in value 
by three hundred. I have the best of all reasons for 
resting in the assurance that for every pound I have 
spent I am three to the good. There is no economy 
like legitimate expenditure. 

I wonder if real authorities in garden design would 
think I was right in treating after the Dutch fashion 
the little enclosed piece of ground on which I tried 
my prentice hand. 

In order to arrive at a conclusion on this point I 
should like to be more fully informed as to what 
is congruous and what incongruous. What are the 
important elements to consider in the construction of 
a Dutch garden, and are these elements in sympathy 
with the foreground of such a picture as I had before 
me when I made up my mind on the subject? 

Now I have seen many Dutch gardens in Holland, 
and in Cape Colony — relics of the old Dutch Colonial 



80 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

days — and every one knows how conservative is this 
splendid if somewhat over-hospitable race. Some of 
the gardens lying between Cape Town and Simon's 
Bay, and also on the higher ground above Mossel 
Bay are what old-furniture dealers term " in mint 
condition " — I disclaim any suggestion of a pun upon 
the herb, which in Dutch houses at the Cape is not 
used in sauce for Iamb. They are as they were laid 
out by the Solomons, the Cloetes, the Van der Byls, 
and the other old Dutch Colonial families; so far 
from adapting themselves to the tropical and sub- 
tropical conditions existing in the Colony, they 
brought their home traditions into their new sur- 
roundings with results that were both happy and 
profitable. There are certainly no finer or more 
various bulbs than those of Dutch growth at the 
Cape, and I have never seen anything more beau- 
tiful than the heaths on the Flats between Mowbray 
and Rondesbosch at the foot of the Devil's Peak of 
Table Mountain. 

A Dutch gentleman once said to me in Rotterdam, 
" If you want to see a real Dutch garden you must 
go to the Cape, or, better still, to England — 
for it." 

He meant that in both places greater pains are 
taken to maintain the original type than, generally 
speaking, in Holland. 

I know that he spoke of what he knew, and with 
what chances of observation I have had, I long ago 
came to the conclusion that the elements of what is 
commonly called a Dutch garden do not differ so 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 81 

greatly from those that went to the making of the 
oldest English herb and flower garden. This being 
so, when I asked myself how I should lay out a fore- 
ground that should be congenial with the picture seen 
through the window of tne marble-panelled room, I 
knew that the garden should be as like as possible 
that which would be planted by the porter's wife 
when the Castle was at its best. The porter's lodge 
would join on to the gate, and one side of the gate- 
way touches my ground, where the lodge would be; 
so that, with suggestions from the Chatelaine, who 
had seen the world, and the Chaplain, who may have 
been familiar with the earliest gardens in England — 
the monastery gardens — she would lay out the little 
bit of ground pretty much, I think, as I have done. 
In those days people had not got into the way of 
differentiating between gardens and gardens — there 
was no talk about " false notes " in design, men did 
not sleep uneasily o' nights lest they had made an 
irremediable mistake in giving hospitality to a crim- 
son peony in a formal bed or in failing to dig up an 
annual that had somehow found a place in a herba- 
ceous border. But a garden bounded by walls must 
be neat or nothing, and so the porter's wife made a 
Dutch garden without being aware of what she was 
doing, and I followed her example, after the lapse of 
a few hundred years, knowing quite well what I was 
doing in acting on the principle that the surround- 
ings should suggest the garden. I know now, how- 
ever, that because William the Conqueror had a fine 
growth of what we call Dianthus Caryophylla at his 



82 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Castle of Falaise, we should have scrupulously fol- 
lowed his example. However, the elements of a 
Dutch garden are geometrical, and within four walls 
and with four right angles one cannot but be geomet- 
rical. One cannot have the charming disorderliness 
of a meadow bounded by two meandering streams. 
That is why I know I was right in refusing to allow 
any irregularity in my treatment of the ground. I 
put my sundial exactly in the middle and made it the 
centre for four small beds crossed by a narrow grass 
path; and except for the simple central design there 
is no attempt at colour effect. But every one of the 
little beds is brilliant with tulips or pansies or antirr- 
hinum or wallflowers, as the season suggests. There 
is the scent of lavender from four clumps — one at 
each angle of the walls — and over the western coping 
a pink rose climbs. To be consistent I should confine 
the growth of this rose to an espalier against the wall. 
I mean to be consistent some day in this matter and 
others nearly as important, and I have been so mean- 
ing for the past ten years. 

I picked up some time ago four tubs of box and 
placed one in each corner of the grass groundwork 
of the design; but I soon took them away; they were 
far too conspicuous. They suggested that I was 
dragging in Holland by the hair of the head, so to 
speak. 

It is the easiest thing in the world to spoil a good 
effect by over-emphasis; and any one who fancies 
that the chief note in a Dutch garden is an over- 
growth of box makes a great mistake. It is like put- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 83 

ting up a board with " This way to the Dutch gar- 
den," planted on its face. 

I remember years ago a play produced at the Hay- 
market, when Tree had the theatre and Mr. J. 
Comyns Carr was his adviser. It was a successor to 
an adaptation of Called Bach, the first of the " shill- 
ing shockers," as they were styled. In one scene the 
curtain rose upon several of the characters sucking 
oranges, and they kept at it through the whole scene. 
That is what it is termed " local colour " ; and it was 
hoped that every one who saw them so employed 
was convinced that the scene was laid in Seville. It 
might as well have been laid in the gallery of a 
theatre, where refreshment is taken in the same form. 

M. Bizet achieved his " local colour " in Carmen 
in rather a more subtle way. He did not bother about 
oranges. The first five bars of the overture prepared 
us for Spain and we lived in it until the fall of the 
curtain, and we return to it when one of the children 
strums a few notes of ee U amour est un oiseau 
rebelled or the Toreador's braggadocio. 

But although I have eaten oranges in many parts 
of the world since I witnessed that play at the Hay- 
market I have never been reminded of it, and to-day 
I forget what it was all about, and I cannot for the 
life of me recollect what was its name. 

So much for the ineffectiveness of obvious effects. 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 

It is a dreadful thing to live in the same town as an 
Atheist! I had no idea that a house in Yard ley 
Parva would ever be occupied by such an one. I 
fancied that I was leaving them all behind me in 
London, where I could not avoid getting into touch 
with several; no one can unless one refuses to have 
anything to say to the intellectual or artistic classes. 
People in London are so callous that they do not 
seem to mind having atheists to dinner or talking with 
them without hostility at a club. That is all very well 
for London, but it doesn't do in Yardley Parva, thank 
God! Atheism is very properly regarded as a dis- 
tinct social disqualification — almost as bad as being 
a Nonconformist. 

Friswell is the name of our atheist. What brought 
him here I cannot guess. But he bought a house that 
had once been the rectory of a clergyman (when I 
mention the Clergy in this book it must be taken for 
granted that I mean a priest of the Church of Eng- 
land) and the predecessor of that clergyman had been 
a Rural Dean. How on earth the agent could sell 
him the house is a mystery that has not yet been 
solved, though many honest attempts in this direction 
have been made. The agent was blamed for not mak- 

84 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 85 

ing such inquiries as would have led to the detection 
of the fellow. He was held responsible for Friswell's 
incorporation as a burgess, just as Graham the green- 
grocer was held responsible for the epidemic of 
mumps which it is known he brought into the town 
in a basket of apples from Baston. 

But the agent's friends make excuses for him. 
While admitting that he may have been culpably 
careless in order to secure a purchaser for a house 
that nobody seemed to want in spite of its hallowed as- 
sociations, they are ready to affirm that these atheists 
have all the guile of their Master, so that even if the 
agent had been alert in making the essential inquiries, 
the man would not hesitate to give the most plausi- 
ble answers in order to accomplish his object — the 
object of the wolf that has his eye on a sheep- 
fold. 

This may be so — I decline to express an opinion 
one way or another. All I know is that Friswell has 
written some books that are known in every part of 
the civilised world and in Germany as well, and that 
we find him when he comes here quite interesting and 
amusing. But needless to say we do not permit him 
to go too far. We do not allow ourselves to be inter- 
ested in him to the jeopardising of our principles or 
our position in Yardley Parva. We do not allow our- 
selves to be amused at the reflection that he is going 
in the wrong direction; on the contrary, we shudder 
when it strikes us. But so insidious are his ways that 
— Heaven forgive me — I feel that he tells me much 
that I do not know about what is true and what is 



86 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

false, and that if he were to leave the neighbourhood 
I should miss him. 

It is strange that he should be married to a charm- 
ing woman, who is a daughter of probably the most 
orthodox vicarage in the Midlands — a home where 
every Sunday is given over to such accessories of 
orthodoxy as an Early Service, Morning Church, 
Sirloin of Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, Fruit Tart 
and Real Egg Custard, Sunday School, the Solution 
of Acrostics, Evening-song, and Cold Chicken with 
Salad. 

And yet she could ally herself with a man who does 
not hesitate to express the opinion that if a child dies 
before it is baptized it should not be assumed that 
anything particular happens to it, and that it was a 
great pity that the Church was upheld by three mur- 
derers, the first being Moses, who promulgated the 
Ten Commandments, the second Paul, who promul- 
gated the Christianity accepted by the Church, and 
the third Constantine, who promulgated the Nicene 
Creed. I have heard him say this, and much more, 
and yet beyond a doubt his wife still adores him, 
laughs at him, says he is the most religious man she 
ever knew, and goes to church regularly ! 

One cannot understand such a thing as this. In 
her own vicarage home every breath that Mrs. Fris- 
well breathed was an inspiration of the Orthodox — 
and yet she told me that her father, who was for 
twenty-seven years Vicar of the parish and the 
Bishop's Surrogate, thought very highly of Mr. Fris- 
well and his scholarship! 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 87 

That is another thing to puzzle over. Of course 
we know that scholarship has got nothing to do with 
Orthodoxy — it is the weak things of the world that 
have been chosen to confound the wise — but for a 
vicar of the Church of England to remain on friendly 
terms with an atheist, and to approve of his daugh- 
ter's marriage with such an one, is surely not to be 
understood by ordinary people. 

I do not know whether or not I neglected my duty 
in refraining from forbidding Friswell my garden 
when I heard him say that the God worshipped by the 
Hebrews with bushels of incense must have been re- 
garded by them as occupying a position something 
like that of the chairman of the smoking concert; and 
that the High Church parson here was like a revue 
artist, whose ambition is to have as many changes of 
costume as was possible in every performance; but 
though I was at the point of telling him that even my 
toleration had its limits, yet somehow I did not like 
to go to such a length without Dorothy's permission; 
and I know that Dorothy likes him. 

She says the children are fond of him, and she her- 
self is fond of Mrs. Friswell. 

" Yes," I told her, " you would not have me kill a 
viper because Rosamund had taken a fancy to its 
markings and its graceful action before darting on 
its prey." 

" Don't be a goose," said she. " Do you suggest 
that Mr. Friswell is a viper?' 

" Well, if a viper may be looked on as a type of 
all ' 



88 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" Well, if he is a viper, didn't St. Paul shake one 
off his hand into the fire hefore any harm was done? 
I think we would do well to leave Mr. Friswell to be 
dealt with by St. Paul." 

" Meaning that " 

" That if the exponent of the Christianity of the 
Churches cannot be so interpreted in the pulpits that 
Mr. Friswell's sayings are rendered harmless, well, 
so much the worse for the Churches." 

" There's such a thing as being too liberal-minded, 
Dorothy," said I solemnly. 

"I suppose there is," said she; "but you will 
never suffer from it, my beloved, except in regard 
to the clematis which you will spare every autumn 
until we shall shortly have no blooms on it at 
all." 

That was all very well ; but I was uncertain about 
Rosamund. She is quite old enough to understand 
the difference between what Mr. Friswell says in the 
garden and what the Reverend Thomas Brown- 
Browne says in the pulpit. I asked her what she had 
been talking about to Mr. Friswell when he was here 
last week. 

" I believe it was about Elisha," she replied. " Oh, 
yes; I remember I asked him if he did not think 
Elisha a horrid vain old man." 

" You asked him that? " 

" Yes; it was in the first lesson last Sunday — that 
about the bears he brought out of the wood to eat 
the poor children who had made fun of him — horrid 
old man ! " 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 89 

" Rosamund, he was a great prophet — one of the 
greatest," said I. 

"All the same he was horrid! He must have been 
the vainest as well as the most spiteful old man that 
ever lived. What a shame to curse the poor children 
because they acted like children! You know that if 
that story were told in any other book than the Bible 
you would be the first to be down on Elisha. If I 
were to say to you, Daddy, " Go up, thou bald head! " 
— you know there's a little bald place on the top 
there that you try to brush your hair over — if I were 
to say that to you, what would you do ? " 

" I suppose I should go at you bald-headed, my 
dear," said I incautiously. 

" I don't like the Bible made fun of," said Dorothy, 
who overheard what I did not mean for any but the 
sympathetic ears of her eldest daughter. 

" I'm not making fun of it, Mammy," said the 
daughter. " Just the opposite. Just think of it — 
forty-two children — only it sounds much more when 
put the other way, and that makes it all the worse — 
forty and two poor children cruelly killed because a 
nasty old prophet was vain and ill-tempered ! " 

" It doesn't say that he had any hand in it, does 
it? " I suggested in defence of the Man of God. 

" Well, not — directly," replied Rosamund. " But 
it was meant to make out that he had a hand in it. 
It says that he cursed them in the name of the Lord." 

" And what did Mr. Friswell say about the story? " 
inquired Dorothy. 

" Oh, he said that, being a prophet, Elisha wasn't 



90 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

thinking about the present, but the future — the time 
we're living in — the Russian Bear or the Bolsheviks 
or some of the — the — what's the thing that they kill 
Jews with in Russia, Mammy?" 

" I don't know — anything that's handy, I fancy, 
and not too expensive," replied the mother. 

" He gave it a name — was it programme? " asked 
the child. 

" Oh, a pogrom — a pogrom ; though I fancy a pro- 
gramme of Russian music would have been equally 
effective," I put in. " Well, Mr. Friswell may be 
right about the bears. I suppose it's the business of 
a prophet to prophesy. But I should rather fancy, 
looking at the transaction from the standpoint of a 
flutter in futures, and also that the prophet had the 
instincts of Israel, that his bears had something to do 
with the Stock Exchange." 

" Mr. Friswell said nothing about that," said Rosa- 
mund. " But he explained about Naaman and his 
leprosy and how he was cured." 

" It tells us that in the Bible, my dear," said 
Dorothy, " so of course it is true. He washed seven 
times in the Jordan." 

" Yes, Mr. Friswell says that it is now known that 
half a dozen of the complaints translated leprosy in 
the Bible were not the real leprosy, and it was from 
one of these that Naaman was suffering, and what 
Elisha did was simply to prescribe for him a course 
of seven baths in the Jordan which he knew contained 
sulphur or something that is good for people with 
that complaint. He believes in all the miracles. He 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 91 

says that what was looked on as a miracle a few years 
ago is an everyday thing now." 

" He's quite right, darling," said Dorothy approv- 
ingly. Then turning to me, " You see, Mr. Friswell 
has really been doing his best to keep the children 
right, though you were afraid that he would have a 
bad effect upon them." 

" I see," said I. " I was too hasty in my judgment. 
He is a man of uncompromising orthodoxy. We 
shall see him holding a class in Sunday-school next, 
or solving acrostics instead of sleeping after the Sun- 
day Sirloin. Did he explain the Gehazi business, 
Rosamund? " 

" He said that he was at first staggered when he 
heard that Elisha had refused the suits of clothes; 
but if Elisha did so, he is sure that his descendants 
have been making up for his self-denial ever since." 

" But about Gehazi catching the leprosy or what- 
ever it was? " 

" I said I thought it was too awful a punishment 
for so small a thing, though, of course, it was dread- 
fully mean of Gehazi. But Mr. Friswell laughed and 
said that I had forgotten that all Gehazi had to do 
to make himself all right again was to follow the pre- 
scription given to Naaman; so he wasn't so hard on 
the man after all." 

"There, you see!" cried Dorothy triumphantly. 
' You talk to me about the bad influence Mr. Fris- 
well may have upon the children, and now you find 
that he has been doing his best to make the difficult 
parts of the Bible credible! For my own part, I feel 



92 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

that a flood of new light has been shed by him over 
some incidents with which I was not in sympathy 
before." 

" All right, have it your own way," said I. 

" You old goose! " said she. " Don't I know that 
why you have your knife in poor Friswell is simply 
because he thought your scheme of treillage was too 
elaborate." 

" Anyhow I'm going to carry it out ' according to 
plan,' to make use of a classic phrase," said I. 

And then I hurried off to the tool-house; and it 
was only when I had been there for some time that 
I remembered that the phrase which I had fancied I 
was quoting very aptly, was the explanation of a 
retreat. 

I hoped that it would not strike Dorothy in that 
way, and induce her to remind me that it was much 
apter than I had desired it to be. 

But there is no doubt that Friswell was right 
about Gehazi carrying out the prescription given to 
ISTaaman, for he remained in the service of the 
prophet, and he would not have been allowed to do 
that if he had been a leper. 



CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 

I have devoted the foregoing chapter to Friswell 
without, I trust, any unnecessary acrimony, but simply 
to show the sort of man he was who took exception 
to the scheme of Formal Garden that I disclosed to 
him long ago. He actually objected to the Formal 
Garden which I had in my mind. 

But an atheist, like the prophet Habakkuk of the 
witty Frenchman, is " capable de tout" 

I have long ago forgiven Friswell for his vexatious 
objection, but I admit that I am only human, and 
that now and again I awake in the still hours of dark- 
ness from a nightmare in which I am tramping over 
formal beds of three sorts of echiverias, pursued by 
Friswell, flinging at me every now and again Mr. W. 
Robinson's volume on Garden Design, which, as every 
one knows, is an unbridled denunciation of Sir Regin- 
ald Blomfield's and Mr. Inigo Triggs's plea for The 
Formal Garden. But I soon fall asleep again 
with, I trust, a smile struggling to the surface of 
the perspiration on my brow, as I reflect upon 
my success in spite of Friswell and the anti- 
formalists. 

More than twenty-five years have passed since the 
battle of the books on the Formal Garden took place, 

93 



94 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

adding another instance to the many brought forward 
by Dorothy of a garden being a battlefield instead of 
a place of peace. I shall refer to the fight in another 
chapter; for surely a stimulating spectacle was that 
of the distinguished horticulturalist attacking the 
distinguished architect with mighty billets of yews 
which, like Samson before his fall, had never known 
shears or secateur, while the distinguished architect 
responded with bricks pulled hastily out from his 
builders' wall. In the meantime I shall try to account 
for my treatment of my predecessor's lawn, which, 
as I have already mentioned, occupied all the flat space 
between the house and the mound with the cherries 
and mays and laburnums towered over by the syca- 
mores and chestnuts. 

It was all suggested to me by the offer which I had 
at breaking-up price of what I might call a " garden 
suite," consisting of a fountain, with a wide basin, and 
the carved stone edging for eight beds — sufficient to 
transform the whole area of the lawn " into something 
rich and strange," — as I thought. 

I had to make up my mind in a hurry, and I did so, 
though not without misgiving. I had never had a 
chance of high gardening before, and I had not so 
much confidence in myself as I have acquired since, 
misplaced though it may be, in spite of my experience. 
I see now what a bold step it was for me to take, and 
I think it is quite likely that I would have rejected it 
if I had had any time to consider all that it meant. 
I had, however, no more than twenty-four hours, and 
before a fourth of that time had passed I received 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 95 

some encouragement in the form of my publisher's 
half-yearly statement. 

Now, Dorothy and I had simply been garden- 
lovers — I mean lovers of gardens, though I don't take 
back the original phrase. We had never been garden 
enthusiasts. We had gone through the Borghese, 
the Villa d'Este, the Vatican, the bowers behind the 
Pitti and the Uffizi, and all the rest of the show-places 
of Italy and the French Riviera — we had spent 
delightful days at every garden-island of the Carib- 
bean, and had gone on to the plateaus of South 
America, where every prospect pleases and there is 
a blaze of flowers beneath the giant yuccas — we had 
even explored Kew together, and we had lived within 
a stone's throw of Holland House and the painters' 
pleasaunces of Melbury Road, but with all we had 
remained content to think of gardens without making 
them any important part of our life. And this being 
so, I now see how arrogant was that act of mine in 
binding myself down to a transaction with as far- 
reaching consequences to me as that of Dr. Faustus 
entailed to him. 

Now I acknowledge that when I looked out over the 
green lawn and thought of all that I had let myself 
in for, I felt anything but arrogant. The destruction 
of a lawn is, like the state of matrimony in the Church 
Service, an act not to be lightly entered into; and I 
think I might have laid away all that stone -work 
which had come to me, until I should become more 
certain of myself — that is how a good many people 
think within a week or two of marriage — if I had not, 



96 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

with those doubts hanging over me, wandered away 
from the lawn and within sight of the straggling 
orchard with its rows of ill-planted plums and apples 
that had plainly borne nothing but leaves for many 
years. They were becoming an eye-sore to me, and the 
thought came in a flash: — 

" This is the place for a lawn. Why not root up 
these unprofitable and uninteresting things and lay 
down the space in grass?" 

Why not, indeed? The more I thought over the 
matter the more reconciled I became to the trans- 
formation of the house lawn. I felt as I fancy the 
father of a well-beloved daughter must feel when she 
tells him that she has promised to marry the son of 
the house at the other side of his paddock. He is 
reconciled to the idea of parting with her by the 
reflection that she will still be living beyond the fence, 
and that he will enjoy communion with her under 
altered conditions. That is the difference between 
parting with a person and parting from a person. 

And now, when I looked at the house lawn, I saw 
that it had no business to be there. It was an element 
of incongruity. It made the house look as if it were 
built in the middle of a field. A field is all very well 
in its place, and a house is all very well in its place, 
but the place of the house is not in the middle of a 
field. It looks its worst there and the field looks its 
worst when the house is overlooking it. 

I think that it is this impression of incongruity that 
has made what is called The Formal Garden a ne- 
cessity of these days. We want a treatment that will 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 97 

take away from the abruptness of the mass of bricks 
and mortar rising straight up from the simplest of 
Nature's elements. We want a hyphenated House- 
and-Garden which we can look on as one and indi- 
visible, like the First French Republic. 

In short, I think that the making of the Formal 
Garden is the marriage ceremony that unites the 
house to its site, " and the twain shall be one flesh." 

That is really the relative position of the two. I 
hold that there are scores of forms of garden that may 
be espoused to a house ; and I am not sure that such 
a term as Formal is not misleading to a large number 
of people who think that Nature should begin the 
moment that one steps out of one's house, and that 
nothing in Nature is formal. I am not going to take 
on me any definition of the constituent elements of 
what is termed the Formal Garden, but I will take it 
on me to stand up against such people as would have 
us believe that the moment you enter a house you 
leave Nature outside. A house is as much a product 
of Nature as a woodland or a rabbit warren or a lawn. 
The original house of that product of Nature known 
as man was that product of Nature known as a cave. 
For thousands of years before he got into his cave he 
had made his abode in the woodland. It was when he 
found he could do better than hang on to his bough 
and, with his toes, take the eggs out of whatever nests 
he could get at, that he made the cave his dwelling; 
and thousands of years later he found that it was 
more convenient to build up the clay into the shape 
of a cave than to scoop out the hillside when he wanted 



98 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

an addition to the dwelling provided for him in the 
hollows made by that natural incident known as a 
landslide. But the dwelling-house of to-day is nothing 
more than a cave built up instead of scooped out. 
Whether made of brick, stone, or clay — all products 
of Nature — it is fundamentally the same as the 
primeval cave dwelling; just as a Corinthian column 
is fundamentally identical with the palm-tree which 
primeval man brought into his service when he wished 
to construct a dwelling independent of the forest of 
his pendulous ancestors. The rabbit is at present in 
the stage of development of the men who scooped out 
their dwellings ; the beaver is in the stage of develop- 
ment of the men who gave up scooping and took to 
building; and will any one suggest that a rabbit warren 
or a beaver village is not Nature? 

Sir R. Blomfield, in his book to which I have 
alluded, will not have this at all. " The building," he 
says, " cannot resemble anything in Nature, unless 
you are content with a mud hut and cover it with 
grass." That may be true enough; but great archi- 
tect that he is, he would have shown himself more 
faithful to his profession if he had been more careful 
about his foundations. If he goes a little deeper into 
the matter he will find that man has not yet been 
civilised or " architected " out of the impressions 
left upon him by his thousands of years of cave-dwell- 
ing, any more than he has been out of his arboreal 
experiences of as many thousand years. While, as 
a boy, he retains vividly those impressions of his ances- 
tors which gradually wear off — though never so 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 99 

completely as to leave no trace behind them — he can- 
not be restrained from climbing trees and enjoying 
the motion of a swing ; and his chief employment when 
left to his own devices is scooping out a cave in a 
sand-bank. For the first ten or fifteen years of his 
life a man is in his instincts many thousand years 
nearer to his prehistoric relations than he is when 
he is twenty; after that the inherited impressions be- 
come blurred, but never wholly wiped out. He is 
still stirred to the deepest depths of his nature by the 
long tresses of a woman, just as was his early parent, 
who knew that he had to depend on such long tresses 
to drag the female on whom he had set his heart to 
his cave. 

Scores of examples could be given of the retention 
of these inherited instincts; but many of them are 
in more than one sense of the phrase, " far-fetched." 
When, however, we know that the architectural design 
which finds almost universal favour is that of the 
column or the pilaster — which is little more than the 
palm-tree of the Oriental forest of many thousand 
years ago — I think we are justified in assuming that 
we have not yet quite lost sight of the fact that our 
dwellings are most acceptable when they retain such 
elements as are congenial with their ancient homes, 
which homes were undoubtedly incidents in the natu- 
ral landscape. 

That is why I think that the right way to claim 
its appropriateness for what is called the Formal 
Garden is, not that a house has no place in Nature, 
and therefore its immediate surrounding should be 



100 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

more or less artificial, but that the house is an inci- 
dent in Nature modified by what is termed Art, 
and therefore the surround should be of the same 
character. 

At the same time, I beg leave to say in this place 
that I am not so besotted upon my own opinion as 
to be incapable of acknowledging that Sir R. Blom- 
field's belief that a house can never be regarded as 
otherwise than wholly artificial, may commend itself 
to a much larger clientele than I can hope for. 

In any case the appropriateness of the Formal Gar- 
den has been proved (literally) down to the ground. 
As a matter of fact, no one ever thought of question- 
ing it in England until some remarkable innovators, 
who called themselves Landscape Gardeners, thought 
they saw their way to work on a new system, and in 
doing so contrived to destroy many interesting fea- 
tures of the landscape. 

But really, landscape gardening has never been 
consistently defined. Its exponents have always 
been slovenly and inconsistent in stating their aims; 
so that while they claim to be all for giving what they 
call Nature the supreme place in their designs, it 
must appear to most people that the achievement of 
these designs entails treating Nature most un- 
naturally. The landscape gardeners of the early 
years of the cult seem to me to be in the position of 
the boy of whom the parents said, " Charlie is so very 
fond of animals that we are going to make a butcher 
of him." To read their enunciation of the principles 
by which they professed to be inspired is to make one 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 101 

feel that they thought the butchery of a landscape 
the only way to beautify it. 

But, I repeat, the examples of their work with which 
we are acquainted show but a small amount of con- 
sistency with their professions of faith. When we read 
the satires that were written upon their work in the 
eighteenth century, we really feel that the lampooners 
have got hold of the wrong brief, and that they are 
ridiculing the upholders of the Formal Garden. 

So far as I was concerned in dealing with my insig- 
nificant garden home, I did not concern myself with 
principles or theories or schools or consistency or 
inconsistency ; I went ahead as I pleased, and though 
Friswell shook his head — I have not finished with him 
yet on account of that mute expression of disagree- 
ment with my aims — I enjoyed myself thoroughly, if 
now and again with qualms of uneasiness, in laying 
out what I feel I must call the House Garden rather 
than the Formal Garden, where the lawn had spread 
itself abroad, causing the wing of the house to have 
something of the appearance of a lighthouse springing 
straight up from a green sea. As it is now, that green 
expanse suggests a tropical sea with many brilliant 
islands breaking up its placid surface. 

That satisfies me. If the lighthouse remains, I have 
given it a raison d'etre by strewing the sea with islands. 

I made my appeal to Olive, the practical one. 

" Yes," she said, after one of her thoughtful inter- 
vals. " Yes, I think it does look naturaler." 

And I do believe it does. 



CHAPTER THE NINTH 

I differ from many people who know more about 
garden-making than I know or than I ever shall know, 
in believing that it is unnecessary for the House Gar- 
den — I will adopt this name for it — to be paved be- 
tween the beds. I have seen this paving done in many 
cases, and to my mind it adds without any need what- 
soever a certain artificiality to the appearance of this 
feature of the garden. By all means let the paths be 
paved with stone or brick ; I have had all mine treated 
in this way, and thereby made them more natural in 
appearance, suggesting, as they do, the dry water- 
course of a stream: every time I walk on them I 
remember the summer aspect of that beautiful water- 
course at Funchal in the island of Madeira, which 
becomes a thoroughfare for several months of the 
year; but I am sure that the stone edgings of the 
beds and of the fountain basin look much better 
surrounded by grass. All that one requires to do 
in order to bring the House Garden in touch with 
the house is to bring something of the material of the 
house on to the lawn, and to force the house to 
reciprocate with a mantle of ampelopsis patterned 
with clematis. 

All that I did was to remove the turf within the 

102 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 103 

boundary of my stone edging and add the necessary 
soil. A week was sufficient for all, including the foun- 
tain basin and the making of the requisite attachment 
to the main water pipe which supplies the garden 
from end to end. 

And here let me advise any possible makers of 
garden fountains on no account to neglect the intro- 
duction of a second outlet and tap for the purpose 
of emptying the pipe during a frost. The cost will 
be very little extra, and the operation will prevent so 
hideous a catastrophe as the bursting of a pipe pass- 
ing through or below the concrete basin. My plumber 
knew his business, and I have felt grateful to him for 
making such a provision against disaster, when I have 
found six inches of ice in the basin after a week's 
frost. 

At first I was somewhat timid over the planting of 
the stone-edged beds. I had heard of carpet bedding, 
and I had heard it condemned without restraint. I 
had also seen several examples of it in public gardens 
at seaside places and elsewhere, which impressed me 
only by the ingenuity of their garishness. Some one, 
too, had put the veto upon any possible tendency on 
my part to such a weakness by uttering the most 
condemnatory words in the vocabulary of art — Early 
Victorian! To be on the safe side I planted the beds 
with herbaceous flowers, only reserving two for 
fuchsias, of which I have always been extremely 
fond. 

I soon came to find out that a herbaceous scheme 
in that place was a mistake. For two months we had 



104 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

to look at flowers growing, for a month we had to look 
at things rampant, and for a month we had to watch 
things withering. At no time was there an equal show 
of colour in all the beds. The blaze of beauty I had 
hoped for never appeared: here and there we had a 
flash of it, but it soon flickered out, much to our dis- 
appointment. If the period of the ramp had syn- 
chronised for all the beds it would not have been so 
bad; but when one subject was rampant the others 
were couchant, and no one was pleased. 

The next year we tried some more dwarf varieties 
and such annuals as verbenas, zinnias, scabious, gode- 
tias, and clarkias, but although every one came on all 
right, yet they did not come on simultaneously, and I 
felt defrauded of my chromatic effects. A consider- 
able number of people thought the beds quite a suc- 
cess; but we could not see with their eyes, and our 
feeling was one of disappointment. 

Happily, at this time I bought for a few shillings 
a few boxes of the ordinary echeveria secunda glauca, 
and, curiously enough, the same day I came upon a 
public place where several beds of the same type as 
mine, set in an enclosed space of emerald grass, were 
planted with echeveria and other succulents, in pat- 
terns, with a large variety of brilliantly-coloured 
foliage and a few dwarf calceolarias and irisines. In 
a moment I thought I saw that this was exactly what 
I needed — whether it was carpet bedding or early 
Victorian or inartistic, this was what I wanted, and I 
knew that I should not be happy until I got it. Every 
bed looked like a stanza of Keats, or a box of enamels 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 105 

from the Faubourg de Magnine in Limoges, where 
Nicholas Laudin worked. 

That was three years ago, and although I planted 
out over three thousand echeverias last summer, I 
had not to buy another box of the same variety ; I had 
only to find some other succulents and transplant 
some violas in order to achieve all that I hoped for 
from these beds. For three years they have been 
altogether satisfying with their orderly habits and 
reposeful colouring. The glauca is the shade that the 
human eye can rest upon day after day without weari- 
ness, and the pink and blue and yellow and purple 
violas which I asked for a complement of colours, do 
all that I hoped they would do. 

Of course we have friends who walk round the 
garden, look at those beds with dull eyes of disap- 
proval, and walk on after imparting information 
on some contentious point, such as the necessity to 
remove the shoots from the briers of standard roses, 
or the assurance that the slugs are fond of the leaves 
of hollyhock. We have an occasional visitor who 
says — 

"Isn't carpet-bedding rather old-fashioned?" 

So I have seen a lady in the spacious days of the 
late seventies shake her head and smile pityingly in 
a room furnished with twelve ribbon-back chairs made 
by the great Director. 

"Old-fashioned — gone out years ago!" were the 
terms of her criticism. 

But so far as I am concerned I would have no more 
objection to one of the ribbon-borders of long ago, if 



106 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

it was in a suitable place, than I would have to a round 
dozen of ribbon-back chairs in a panelled room with 
a mantelpiece by Bossi and a glass chandelier by one 
of the Adam Brothers. It is only the uninformed 
who are ready to condemn something because they 
think that it is old-fashioned, just as it is only the 
ignorant who extol something because it happens to be 
antique. I was once lucky enough to be able to buy 
an exquisitely chased snuff-box because the truthful 
catalogue had described it as made of pinchbeck. For 
the good folk in the saleroom the word pinchbeck 
was enough. It was associated in their minds with 
something that was a type of the meretricious. But 
the pinchbeck amalgam was a beautiful one, and the 
workmanship of some of the articles made of it was 
usually of the highest class. Now that people are 
better educated they value — or at least some of them 
value — a pinchbeck buckle or snuff-box for its artistic 
beauty. 

We see our garden more frequently than do any of 
our visitors, and we are satisfied with its details — 
within bounds, of course. It has never been our 
ambition to emulate the authorities who control the 
floral designs blazing in the borders along the sea- 
front of one of our watering-places, which are admired 
to distraction by trippers under the influence of a 
rag-time band and other stimulants. We do not 
long so greatly to see a floral Union Jack in all its 
glory at our feet, or any loyal sentiment lettered in 
dwarf beet and blue lobelia against a background 
of crimson irisine. We know very well that such 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 107 

marvels are beyond our accomplishment. What we 
hoped for was to have under our eyes for three months 
of the year a number of beds full of wallflowers, 
tulips, and hyacinths, and for four months equally 
well covered with varied violas, memsembrianthium, 
mauve ageratum, the praecox dwarf roses, variegated 
cactus used sparingly, and as many varieties of eche- 
veria used lavishly, with here and there a small dracsena 
or perhaps a tuft of feathery grass or the accentuations 
of a few crimson begonias to show that we are not 
afraid of anything. 

We hold that the main essential of the beds of the 
House Garden is " finish." They must look well from 
the day they are planted in the third week of May 
until they are removed in the last week of October. 
We do not want that barren interval of a month or 
six weeks when the tulips have been lifted and their 
successors are growing. We do not want a single day 
of empty beds or colourless beds; we do not want to 
see a square inch of the soil. We want colour and 
contour under our eyes from the first day of March 
until the end of October, and we get it. We have no 
trouble with dead leaves or drooping blooms — no 
trouble with snails or slugs or leather-jackets. Every 
bed is presentable for the summer when the flowers 
that bloom in the spring have been removed; the 
effect is only agreeably diversified when the begonias 
show themselves in July. 

Is the sort of thing that I have described to be called 
carpet-bedding? I know not and I trow not; all that 
I know is that it is the sort of thing that suits us. 



108 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Geometry is its foundation and geometry represents 
all that is satisfying, because it is Nature's closest 
ally when Nature wishes to produce Beauty. Almost 
every flower is a geometrical study. Let rose bushes 
ramp as they may, the sum of all their ramping is 
that triumph of geometry, the rose. Let the clematis 
climb as unruly as it may, the end of its labours is a 
geometrical star; let the dandelion be as disagreeable 
as it pleases — I don't intend to do so really, only for 
the sake of argument — but its rows of teeth are beauti- 
fully geometrical, and the fairy finish of its life, which 
means, alas ! the magical beginning of a thousand new 
lives, is a geometrical marvel. 

But I do not want to accuse myself of excusing 
myself over much for my endeavour to restore a 
fashion which I was told had " gone out." I only say 
that if what I have done in my stone-edged geometri- 
cal beds is to be slighted because some fool has called 
it carpet-bedding, I shall at least have the satisfaction 
of knowing that I have worked on the lines of Nature. 
Nature is the leader of the art of carpet-bedding on 
geometrical lines. Nature's most beautiful spring 
mattress is a carpet bed of primroses, wild hyacinths, 
daffodils, and daisies — every one of them a geometri- 
cal marvel. As a matter of fact the design of every 
formal bed in our garden is a copy of a snow crystal. 

Of course, so far as conforming to the dictates of 
fashion in a garden is concerned, I admit that I am a 
nonconformist. I do not think that any one who 
has any real affection for the development of a garden 
will be ready to conform to any fashion of the hour 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 109 

in gardening. I believe that there never was a time 
when the artistic as well as the scientific side of garden 
design was so fully understood or so faithfully adhered 
to as it is just now. There is nothing to fear from 
the majority of the exponents of the art; it is with 
the unconsidering amateurs that the danger lies. The 
dangerous amateur is the one who assumes that there 
is fashion in gardening as there is a fashion in gar- 
ments, and that one must at all hazards live up to the 
dernier cri or get left behind in the search for the right 
thing. For instance, within the last six or seven years 
it has become " the right thing " to have a sunk gar- 
den. Now a sunk garden is, literally, as old as the 
hills ; the channel worn in the depth of a valley by an 
intermittent stream becomes a sunk garden in the 
summer. The Dutch, not having the advantage of 
hills and vales, were compelled to imitate Nature by 
sinking their flower-patches below the level of the 
ground. They were quite successful in their attempt 
to put the garden under their eyes; by such means 
they were able fully to admire the patterns in which 
their bulbs were arranged. But where is the sense 
in adopting in England the handicap of Holland? 
It is obvious that if one can look down upon a garden 
from a terrace one does not need to sink the ground 
to a lower level. And yet I have known of several 
instances of people insisting on having a sunk garden 
just under a terrace. They had heard that sunk gar- 
dens were the fashion and they would not be happy 
if there was a possibility of any one thinking that they 
were out of the fashion. 



110 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Then the charm of the rock garden was being 
largely advertised and talked about, so mounds of 
broken bricks and stones and " slag " and rubbish arose 
alongside the trim villas, and the occupants slept in 
peace knowing that those heights of rubbish repre- 
sented the height — the heights of fashion. Then came 
the " crevice " fashion. A conscientious writer dis- 
coursed of the beauty of the little things that grow 
between the bricks of old walls, and forthwith yards 
of walls, guaranteed to be of old bricks, sprang up in 
every direction, with hand-made crevices in which 
little gems that had never been seen on walls before, 
were stuck, and simple nurserymen were told that 
they were long behind the time because they were 
unable to meet the demand for house leeks. I have 
seen a ten-feet length of wall raised almost in the 
middle of a villa garden for no other purpose than to 
provide a foot-hold for lichens. The last time I saw 
it it was providing a space for the exhibition of a 
printed announcement that an auction would take 
place in the house. 

But by far the most important of the schemes which 
of late have been indulged in for adding interest to 
the English garden, is the " Japanese style." The 
" Chinese Taste," we all know, played a very impor- 
tant part in many gardens in the eighteenth century, 
as it did in other directions in the social life of Eng- 
land. The flexible imagination of Thomas Chippen- 
dale found it as easy to introduce the leading Chinese 
notes in his designs as the leading French notes; and 
his genius was so well controlled that his pieces " in 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 111 

the Chinese Taste " did not look at all incongruous 
in an English mansion. The Chinese wallpaper was 
a beautiful thing in its way, nor did it look out of place 
in a drawing-room with the beautifully florid mirrors 
of Chippendale design on the walls, and the noble 
lacquer caskets and cabinets that stood below them. 
Under the same impulse Sir Thomas Chambers was 
entrusted with the erection of the great pagoda in 
Kew Gardens, and Chinese junks were moored along- 
side the banks to enable visitors to drink tea " in the 
Chinese Taste." The Staffordshire potters repro- 
duced on their ware some excellent patterns that had 
originated with the Celestials, and in an attempt to 
be abreast of the time, Goldsmith made his Citizen of 
the World a Chinese gentleman. 

For obvious reasons, however, there was no Jap- 
anese craze at that time. Little was known of the 
supreme art of Japan, and nothing of the Japanese 
Garden. Now we seem to be making up for this 
deprivation of the past, and the Japanese style of 
gardening is being represented in many English 
grounds. I think that nothing could be more interest- 
ing, or, in its own way, more exquisite: but is it not 
incongruous in its new-found home? 

It is nothing of the sort, provided that it is not 
Drought into close proximity to the English garden. 
In itself it is charming, graceful, and grateful in every 
way ; but unless its features are kept apart from those 
of the English garden, it becomes incongruous and 
unsatisfactory. It is, however, only necessary to put 
it in its place, which should be as far away as possible 



112 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

from the English house and House Garden, and it will 
be found fully to justify its importation. It possesses 
all the elements that go to the formation of a real 
garden, the strongest of these being, in my opinion, 
a clear and consistent design; unless a garden has 
both form and design it is worth no consideration, 
except from the very humblest standpoint. 

Its peculiar charm seems to me to be found in what 
the nurseryman's catalogue calls the " dwarf habit." 
It is essentially among the miniatures. Though it 
may be as extensive as one pleases to make it, yet it 
gains rather than loses when treated as its trees are 
by the skilful hands of the miniaturist. Without 
suggesting that it should be reduced to toy dimensions, 
yet I am sure that it should be so that no tall human 
being should be seen in it. It is the garden of 
a small race. A big Englishman should not be 
allowed into it. It would not be giving it fair 
play. 

Fancying that I have put its elements into a nut- 
shell, carrying my minimising to a minimum, I repeat 
the last sentence to Dorothy. 

" You would not exclude Mr. Friswell," said 
she. 

" Atheist Friswell is not life-size : he may go without 
rebuke into the most miniature Japanese garden in 
Bond Street," I reply gratefully. 

" And how about Mrs. Friswell? " she asks. 

" She is three sizes too big, even in her chapel 
shoes," I replied. 

Mrs. Friswell, in spite of her upbringing — perhaps 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 113 

on account of it — wears the heelless shoes of Little 
Bethel. 

" Then Mr. Friswell will never be seen in a Jap- 
anese garden," said Dorothy. 

She does like Mrs. Friswell. 



CHAPTER THE TENTH 

But there is in my mind one garden in which I should 
like to see the tallest and most truculent of English- 
men. It is the Tiergarten at Berlin. I recollect very 
vividly the first time that I passed through the Brand- 
enburger Gate to visit some friends who occupied a 
flat in the block of buildings known as "In den 
Zelten." I had just come within sight of the sentry 
at the gate-house when I saw him rush to the door 
of the guard-room and in a few seconds the whole 
guard had turned out with a trumpet and a drum. 
I was surprised, for I had not written to say that I 
was coming, and I was quite unused to such courtesy 
either in Berlin or any other city where there is a 
German population. 

Before the incident went further I became aware 
of the fact that all the vehicles leaving " Unter den 
Linden " had become motionless, and that the officers 
who were in some of them were standing up at the 
salute. The only carriage in motion was a landau 
drawn by a pair of gray horses, with a handsome man 
in a plain uniform and the ordinary helmet of an 
infantry soldier sitting alone with his face to the 
horses. I knew him in a moment, though I had never 
seen him before — the Crown Prince Frederick, the 

114 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 115 

husband of our Princess Royal — the " Fritz " of the 
intimate devotional telegrams to " Augusta " from the 
battlefields of France in 1870. 

That Crown Prince was the very opposite to his 
truculent son and that contemptible blackguard, his 
son's son. Genial, considerate, and unassuming, dis- 
liking all display and theatrical posing, he was much 
more of an English gentleman than a German Prince. 
His son Wilhelm had even then begun to hate 
him — so I heard from a high personage of the Court. 

I am certain that it was his reading of the campaign 
of 1870-1 that set this precious Wilhelm — this 
Emperor of the penny gaff — on his last enterprise. 
If one hunts up the old newspapers of 1870 one will 
read in every telegram from the German front of 
the King of Prussia and the Crown Prince marching 
to Victory, in the campaign started by a forgery and 
a lie, by that fine type of German trickery, unscrupu- 
lousness, brutality, and astuteness, Bismarck. Wil- 
helm could not endure the thought of the glory of his 
house being centred in those who had gone before him, 
and he chafed at the years that were passing without 
history repeating itself. He could with difficulty re- 
strain himself from his attempt to dominate the world 
until his first-begotten was old enough to dominate the 
demi-monde of Paris — " Wilhelm to-day successfully 
stormed Le Chemin des Dames," was the telegram 
that he sent to the Empress, in imitation of those sent 
by his grandfather to his Augusta. Le Chemin des 
Dames! — beyond a doubt his dream was to give 
France to his eldest, England to his second, and 



116 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Russia to the third of the litter. After that, as he 
said to Mr. Gerard, he would turn his attention to 
America. 

That was the dream of this Bonaparte done in 
German silver, and now his house is left unto him 
desolate — unto him whose criminality, sustained by 
the criminal conceit of his subjects, left thousands of 
houses desolate for evermore. 

But we are now in the Garden of Peace, whose 
sweet savour should not be allowed to become rank by 
the mention of the name of the instigator of the 
German butcheries. 

There is little under my eyes in this garden to re- 
mind me of one on the Rhine where I spent a summer 
a good many years ago. Its situation was ideal. The 
island of legends, Nonnenworth, was all that could be 
seen from one of the garden-houses; and one of the 
windows in the front was arranged in small squares 
of glass stained, but retaining their transparency, 
in various colours — crimson, pink, dark blue, ultra- 
marine, and two degrees yellow. Through these 
theatrical mediums we were exhorted to view the 
romantic island, so that we had the rare chance of 
seeing Nonnenworth bathed in blood, or in flames of 
fire. It was undoubtedly a great privilege, but I only 
availed myself of it once ; though our host, who must 
have looked through those glasses thousands of times, 
was always to be found gazing through the flaming 
yellow at the unhappy isle. 

From the vineyard nearer the house we had the 
finest view of the ruins of the Drachenfels, and, on the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 117 

other side of the Rhine, of Rolandseck. Godesburg 
was farther away, but we used to drive through the 
lovely avenue of cherry-trees and take the ferry to 
the hotel gardens where we lunched. 

Another of the features of the great garden of our 
villa was a fountain whose chief charm was found in 
an arrangement by which, on treading on a certain 
slab of stone at the invitation of our host, the un- 
initiated were met by a deluging squirt of water. 

This was the lighter side of hospitality ; but it was 
at one time to be found in many English gardens, 
one of the earliest being at our Henry's Palace of 
Nonsuch. 

In another well-built hut there was the apparatus 
of a game which is popular aboard ship in the Tropics : 
I believe it is called Bull; it is certainly an adapta- 
tion of the real bull. There is a framework of 
apertures with a number painted on each, the object 
of the player being to throw a metal disc resembling 
a quoit into the central opening. Another hut had a 
pole in the middle and cords with a ring at the end of 
each suspended from above, and the trick was to in- 
duce the ring to catch on to a particular hook in a set 
arranged round the pole. These were the games of 
exercise; but the intellectual visitors had for their 
diversion an immense globe of silvered glass which 
stood on a short pillar and enabled one to get in absurd 
perspective a reflection of the various parts of the 
garden where it was placed. This toy is very popular 
in some parts of France, and I have heard that about 
sixty years ago it was to be found in many English 



118 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

gardens also. It is a great favourite in the German 
lustgarten. 

These are a few of the features of a private garden 
which may commend themselves to some of my 
friends; but the least innocuous will never be found 
within my castle walls. I would not think them 
worth mentioning but for the fact that yesterday 
a visitor kept rubbing us all over with sandpaper, so 
to speak, by talking enthusiastically about her visits to 
Germany, and in the midst of the autumn calm in our 
garden, telling us how beautifully her friend Von 
Bosche had arranged his grounds. She had the impu- 
dence to point to one of the most impregnable of my 
" features," saying with a smile, — 

" The Count would not approve of that, I'm 
afraid." 

" I am so glad," said Dorothy sweetly. " If I 
thought that there was anything here of which he 
would approve, I should put on my gardening boots 
and trample it as much out of existence as our rela- 
tions are with those contemptible counts and all their 
race." 

And then, having found the range, I brought my 
heavy guns into action and " the case began to spread." 

I trust that I made myself thoroughly offensive, 
and when I recall some of the things I said, my 
conscience acquits me of any shortcomings in this 
direction. 

" You were very wise," said Dorothy; " but I think 
you went too far when you said, ' Good-bye, Miss 
Haldane.' I saw her wince at that." 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 119 

" I knew that I would never have a chance of speak- 
ing to her again," I replied. 

"Oh, yes; but — Haldane — Haldane! If you had 
made it Snowden or MacDonald it would not have 
been so bad ; but Haldane ! " 

" I said Haldane because I meant Haldane, and 
because Haldane is a synonym for colossal impudence 
— the impudence of a police-court attorney defending 
a prostitute with whom he was on terms of disgust- 
ing intimacy. What a trick it was to leave the War 
Office, out of which he knew he would be turned, 
and then cajole his friend Asquith into giving him 
a peerage and the Seals, so that he might have his 
pension of five thousand pounds a year for the rest 
of his natural life ! If that is to be condoned, all that 
I can say is that we must revise all our notions of 
political pettifogging. I forget at the moment how 
many retired Lord Chancellors there are who are 
pocketing their pension, but have done nothing to 
earn it." 

" What, do you call voting through thick and thin 
with your party nothing? " 

" I don't. That is how, what we call a sovereign 
to-day is worth only nine shillings, and a man who 
got thirty shillings a week as a gardener only gets 
three pounds now: thirty shillings in 1913 was more 
than three pounds to-day. And in England " 

" Hush, hush. Remember, ' My country right or 
wrong.' " 

" I do remember. That is why I rave. When * my 
country, right or wrong ' is painted out and ' my 



120 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

party, right or wrong ' substituted, isn't it time one 
raved ? " 

' You didn't talk in that strain when you wrote a 
leading article every day for a newspaper." 

"I admit it; but — but — well, things hadn't come 
to a head in those old days." 

" You mean that they had not come into your head, 
mon vieu-oc, if you will allow me to say so." 

I did allow her to say so — she had said so before 
asking my leave, which on the whole I admit is a very 
good way of saying things. 

To be really frank, I confess that I was very glad 
that the dialogue ended here. I fancied the possibility 
of her having stored away in that wonderful group 
of pigeon holes which she calls her memory, a memo- 
randum endorsed with the name of Campbell-Banner- 
man or a dossier labelled " Lansdowne." For myself 
I recollect very well that a vote of the representatives 
of the People had declared that Campbell-Bannerman 
had left the country open to destruction by his failure 
to provide an adequate supply of cordite. In the days 
of poor Admiral Byng such negligence would have 
been quickly followed by an execution; but with the 
politician it was followed by a visit to Buckingham 
Palace and a decoration as a hero. When it was plain 
that Lord Lansdowne had made, and was still mak- 
ing, a muddle of the South African War, he was pro- 
moted to a more important post in the Government — 
namely, the Foreign Office. With such precedents 
culled from the past, why should any one be surprised 
to find the instigator of the Gallipoli gamble, whose 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 121 

responsibility was proved by a Special Commission of 
Inquiry, awarded the most important post next to 
that of the Prime Minister? 

Yes, on the whole I was satisfied to accept my 
Dorothy's smiling rebuke with a smile ; and the sequel 
of the incident showed me that I was wise in this 
respect; for I found her the next day looking with 
admiring eyes at our Temple. 

Our Temple was my masterpiece, and it was the 
" feature " which our visitor had, without meaning it, 
commended so extravagantly when she had assured 
us that her friend Count Von Bosche would not have 
approved of it. 

" I think, my child, now that I come to think of it, 
that your single-sentence retort respecting the value 
of the Count's possible non-approval was more effec- 
tive than my tirade about the vulgarity of German 
taste in German gardens, especially that one at Hon- 
nef-on-Rhine, where I was jocularly deluged with 
Rhine water. You know how to hit off such things. 
You are a born sniper." 

" Sniping is a woman's idea of war," said Dorothy. 

" I don't like to associate women and warfare," 
said I shaking my head. 

" That is because of your gentle nature, dear," said 
she with all the smoothness of a smoothing-iron fresh 
from a seven-times heated furnace. " But isn't it 
strange that in most languages the word War is a 
noun feminine? " 

" They were always hard on woman in those days," 
said I vaguely. " But they're making up for it now." 



122 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" What are you talking about? " she cried. " Why, 
they're harder than ever on women in this country. 
Haven't they just insisted on enchaining them with 
the franchise, with the prospect of seats in the House 
of Commons? Oh, Woman — poor Woman! — poor, 
poor Woman — what have you done to deserve this? " 



CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 

The Temple is one of the " features " which began to 
grow with great rapidity in connection with the House 
Garden. And here let me say that, in my opinion, 
one of the most fascinating elements of the House 
Garden is the way in which its character develops. 
To watch its development is as interesting as to watch 
the growth of a dear child, only it is never wilful, and 
the child is — sometimes. There is no wilfulness in the 
floral part: as I have already explained, the "dwarf 
habit " of the stock prevents all ramping and every 
form of rebellion: but it is different with the "fea- 
tures." I have found that every year brings its sug- 
gestions of development in many directions, and 
surely this constitutes the main attractiveness of 
working out any scheme of horticulture. 

I have found that one never comes to an end in 
this respect; and I am sure that this accounts for 
the great popularity of the House Garden, in spite 
of its enemies having tried to abolish it by calling it 
Formal. The time was when one felt it necessary 
to make excuses for it — Mr. Robinson, one of 
the most eminent of its detractors, was, and still 
is, I am happy to be able to say, the writer to 
whom we all apply for advice in an emergency. He 

123 



124 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

is iEsculapius living on the happiest terms with 
Flora. 

But when we who are her devotees wish to build a 
Temple for her worship, we don't consult iEsculapius: 
he is a physician, not an architect, and Mr. Robinson 
has been trying to convince us for over twenty years 
that an architect is not the person to consult, for he 
knows nothing about the matter. iEsculapius is on 
the side of Nature, we are told, and he has been assur- 
ing us that the architect is not; but in spite of all its 
opponents, the garden of form and finish is the garden 
of to-day. Every one who wishes to have a garden 
worth talking about — a garden to look out upon from 
a house asks for a garden of form and finish. 

I am constantly feeling that I am protesting too 
much in its favour, considering that it needs no apolo- 
gist at this time of day, when, as I have just said, opin- 
ion on its desirability is not divided, so I will hasten 
to relieve myself of the charge of accusation by apol- 
ogy. Only let me say that the beautiful illustrations 
to Mr. Robinson's volume entitled Garden Design 
and Architects' Gardens — they are by Alfred Parsons 
— go far, in my opinion, to prove exactly the opposite 
to what they are designed to prove. We have pic- 
tures of stately houses and of comparatively humble 
houses, in which we are shown the buildings starting 
up straight out of the landscape, with a shaggy tree 
or group of trees cutting off, at a distance of only 
a few yards from the walls, some of the most inter- 
esting architectural features; we have pictures of 
mansions with a woodland behind them and a river 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 125 

flowing in front, and of mansions in the very midst 
of trees, and looking at every one of them we are 
conscious of that element of incongruity which takes 
away from every sense of beauty. In fact, looking 
at the woodcuts, finely executed as they are, we are 
forced to limit our observation to the architecture 
of the houses only; for there is nothing else to observe. 
We feel as if we were asked to admire an unfinished 
wor k — as if the owner of the mansion had spent all 
his money on the building and so was compelled to 
break off suddenly before the picture that he hoped 
to make of the " place " was complete or approach- 
ing completeness. 

Mr. Robinson's strongest objection is to "clip- 
ping." He regards with abhorrence what he calls 
after Horace Walpole, " vegetable sculpture." Well, 
last year, being in the neighbourhood of one of the 
houses which he illustrates as an example of his 
'" natural" style of gardening, I thought I should 
take the opportunity of verifying his quotations. I 
visited the place, but when I arrived at what I was 
told was the entrance, I felt certain that I had been 
misdirected, for I found myself looking through a 
wrought- iron gate at an avenue bounded on both 
sides with some of the most magnificent clipped box 
hedges I had ever seen. Within I was overwhelmed 
with the enormous masses treated in the same way. 
It was not hedges they were, but walls — massive forti- 
fications, ten feet high and five thick, and all clipped! 
I never saw such examples of topiary work. To 
stand among these betes noires of Mr. Robinson made 



126 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

one feel as if one were living among the mastodons 
and other monstrosities of the early world : the small- 
est suggested both in form and bulk the Jumbo of 
our youth — no doubt it had a trunk somewhere, but 
it was completely hidden. The lawn — at the bottom 
of which, by the way, there stood the most imposing 
garden-house I had ever seen outside the grounds of 
Stowe — was divided geometrically by the awful bodies 
of mastodons, mammoths, elephants, and hippo- 
potamuses, the effect being hauntingly Wilsonian, 
Wagnerian, and nightmarish, so that I was glad to 
hurry away to where I caught a glimpse of some 
geometrical flower beds, with patterns delightfully 
worked in shades of blue — Lord Roberts heliotrope, 
ageratum, and verbena. 

I asked the head-gardener, whom the war had 
limited to two assistants, if he spent much time over 
the clipping, and he told me that it took two trained 
men doing nothing else but clipping those walls for 
six weeks out of every year! 

From what Mr. Robinson has written one gathers 
that he regards the clipping of trees as equal in enor- 
mity to the clipping of coins — perhaps even more so. 
If that is the case, it is lucky for those topiarists that 
he is not in the same position as Sir Charles Mathews. 

And the foregoing is a faithful description of the 
" landscape " around one of the houses illustrated in 
his book as an example of the " naturalistic " style. 

But perhaps Mr. Robinson's ideas have become 
modified, as those of the owner of the house must 
have done during the twenty-five years that have 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 127 

elapsed since the publication of his book, subjecting 
Mr. Blomfield (as he was then) and Mr. Inigo Triggs 
to a criticism whose severity resembles that of the 
Quarterly Review of a hundred years ago, or the 
Saturday of our boyhood. 

To return to my Temple, within whose portals I 
swear that I have said my last word respecting the old 
battle of the styles, I look on its erection as the first 
progeny of the matrimonial union of the house with 
its garden. I have mentioned the mound encircled 
with flowering shrubs at the termination of the lawn. 
I am unable to say what part was played by this 
raised ground in the economy of the Norman Castle, 
but before I had been looking at it for very long 
I perceived that it was clearly meant to be the site 
of some building that would be in keeping with the 
design of the garden below it — some building in 
which one could sit and obtain the full enjoyment 
of the floral beds which were now crying out with 
melodious insistence for admiration. 

The difficulty was to know in what form the build- 
ing should be cast. I reckoned that I had a free 
choice in this matter. The boundary wall of the 
Castle is, of course, free from all architectural tram- 
mels. I could afford to ignore it. If the Keep or 
the Barbican had been within sight, my freedom in 
this respect would have been curtailed to the nar- 
rowest limits: I should have been compelled to make 
the Norman or the Decorated the style, for anything 
else would have seemed incongruous in close proxim- 
ity to a recognised type; but under the existing con- 



128 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

ditions I saw that the attempt to carry out in this 
place the Norman tradition would result in something 
that would seem as great a mockery as the sham castle 
near Bath. 

But I perceived that if I could not carry out the 
Norman tradition I might adopt the eighteenth cen- 
tury tradition respecting a garden building, and erect 
one of the classic temples that found favour with the 
great garden makers of that period — something 
frankly artificial, but eminently suggestive of the 
Italian taste which the designers had acquired in 
Italy. 

I have wondered if the erection of these classical 
buildings in English gardens did not seem very incon- 
gruous and artificial when they were first brought 
before the eyes of the patron ; and the conclusion that 
I have come to is that they seemed as suitable to an 
English home as did the pure Greek facade of the 
mansion itself, the fact being that there is no Eng- 
lish style of architecture. Italy gave us the hand- 
somest style for our homes, and when people were 
everywhere met with classical facades — when the 
Corinthian pillar with, perhaps, its modified Roman 
entablature, was to be seen in every direction, the 
classical garden temple was accepted as in perfect 
harmony with its surroundings. So the regular 
couplets of Dryden, Pope, and a score of lesser versi- 
fiers were acclaimed as the most natural and reason- 
able form for the expression of their opinions. Thus 
I hold that, however unenterprising the garden de- 
signers were in being content to copy Continental 



V «i' J*' 









. r • 






"--«»*£ -aSaa 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 120 

models instead of inventing something as original as 
Keats in the matter of form, the modern garden de- 
signer has only to copy in order to produce — well, a 
copy of the formality of their time. But if people 
nowadays do not wish their gardens to reflect the 
tastes of their ancestors for the classical tradition, they 
will be very foolish if they do not adopt something 
better — when they find it. 

Of course I am now still referring to the garden 
out of which the house should spring. The moment 
that you get free from the compelling influence of 
the house, you may go as you please ; and to my mind 
you will be as foolish if you do not do something quite 
different from the House Garden as you would be if 
you were to do anything different within sight of the 
overpowering House — almost as foolish as the people 
who made a beautiful fountain garden and then flung 
it at the head of that natural piece of water, the 
Serpentine. 

My temple was to be in full view of the house, and 
I wished to maintain the tradition of a certain period, 
so I drew out my plans accordingly. I had space 
only for something about ten feet square, and I found 
out what the simplest form of such a building would 
cost. It could be done in stone for some hundreds 
of pounds, in deal for less than a fourth of that sum. 

Both estimates were from well-known people with 
all the facilities for turning out good work at the low- 
est figure of profit; but both estimates made me 
heavy-hearted. I tried to make up my mind not to 
spend the rest of my life in the state of the Children 



130 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

of Israel when their Temple was swept away; but 
within six months I had my vision restored, and un- 
like the old people who wept because the restoration 
was far behind the original in glory, I rejoiced; for, 
rinding that I could not afford to have the structure 
in deal, I had it built of marble, and the cost worked 
out most satisfactorily. In marble it cost me about a 
fourth of the estimate in deal ! 

I did it on the system adopted by the makers of 
the Basilica of St. Mark at Venice. Those economical 
people built their walls of brick and laid their marbles 
upon that. My collection of marbles was distinctly 
inferior to theirs, but I flatter myself that it was come 
by more honestly. The only piece of which I felt 
doubtful, not as regards beauty, but respecting the 
honourable nature of its original acquiring, was a fine 
slab, with many inlays. It was given to Augustus J. 
C. Hare by the Commander of one of the British 
transports that returned from the Black Sea and the 
Crimea in 1855, and it was originally in a church near 
Balaclava. In the catalogue of the sale of Mr. Hare's 
effects at Hurstmonceaux, the name of the British of- 
ficer was given and the name of his ship and the name 
of the church, but the rest is silence. I cannot believe 
that that British officer would have been guilty of 
sacrilege ; but I do not know how many hands a thing 
like this should pass through in order to lose the stain 
of sacrilege, so I don't worry over the question of the 
morality of the transaction, any more than the devout 
worshippers do beneath the mosaics of St. Mark — 
that greatest depository of stolen goods in the world. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 131 

All the rest of my coloured marbles that I applied 
to the brickwork of my little structure came mostly 
from old mantelpieces and restaurant tables, but I 
was lucky enough to alight upon quite a large number 
of white Sicilian tiles, more than an inch thick, which 
were invaluable to me, and a friendly stonemason 
gave me several yards of statuary moulding: it must 
have cost originally about what I paid for my entire 
building. 

It was a great pleasure to me to watch the fabric 
arise, which it did like the towers of Ilium, to music 
— the music of the thrushes and blackbirds and robins 
of our English landscape in the early summer when 
I began my operations — they lasted just on a fort- 
night — and the splendid colour-chorus of the borders. 

But what is a Temple on a hill without steps? and 
what are steps without piers, and what are piers with- 
out vases? 

All came in due time. I found an excellent quarry 
not too far away, and from it I got several tons of 
stone that was easily shaped and squared, and there 
is very little art needed to deal efficiently with such 
monoliths as I had laid on the slope of the mound — 
the work occupied a man and his boy just three days. 
The source of the piers is my secret; but there they 
are with their stone vases to-day, and now from the 
marble seat of the temple, thickly overspread with 
cushions, one can overlook the parterres between the 
mound and the house, and feel no need for the sunk 
garden which is the ambition of such as must be on 
the crest of the latest wave of fashion. 



CHAPTER THE TWELFTH 

Atheist Friswell has been wondering where he saw 
a mount like mine crowned with just such a structure, 
and he has at last shepherded his wandering memory 
to the place. I ventured to suggest the possibilities 
of the island Scios, and Jack Hey wood, the painter, 
who, though our neighbour, still remains our friend, 
makes some noncompromising remark about Milos 
" where the statues come from." 

" I think you'll find the place in a picture-book 
called Beauty Spots in Greece" remarked Mrs. Fris- 
well. Dorothy is under the impression that Friswell's 
researches in the classical lore of one Lempriere is 
accountable for his notion that there is, or was, at one 
time in the world a Temple with some resemblance 
to the one in which we were sitting when he began to 
wonder. 

" Very likely," said he, with a brutal laugh. " The 
temples on the hills were sometimes dedicated to the 
sun — Helios, you know." 

Of course we all knew, or pretended that we knew. 

" And what did your artful Christians do when 
they came upon such a fane? " he inquired. 

" Pulled it down, I suppose ; the early artful Chris- 
tians had no more sense of architectural or antiquarian 

132 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 133 

beauty than the modern exponents of the cult," said 
Heywood. 

" They were too artful for that, those early Chris- 
tian propagandists," said Friswell. " No, they turned 
to the noble Greek worshippers whom they were 
anxious to convert, and cried, dropping their aspirates 
after the manner of the moderns, " dedicated to Elias, 
is it? Quite so — Saint Elias — he is one of our saints." 
That is how it comes that so many churches on hills 
in the Near East have for their patron Saint Elias. 
Who was he, I should like to know." 

" I would do my best to withhold the knowledge 
from you," said Dorothy. " But was there ever really 
such a saint? There was a prophet, of course, but 
that's not just the same." 

" I should think not," said Friswell. " The old 
prophets were the grandest characters of which there 
is a record — your saints are white trash alongside 
them — half-breeds. They only came into existence 
because of the craving of humanity for pluralities of 
worship. The Church has found in her saints the 
equivalents to the whole Roman theology." 

" Mythology," said I correctively. 

" There's no difference between the words," he re- 
plied. 

" Oh, yes, my dear, there is," said his wife. 
" There is the same difference between theology and 
mythology as there is between convert and per- 
vert." 

" Exactly the same difference," he cried. 
" Exactly, but no greater. Christian hagiology — 



134 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

what a horrid word! — is on all-fours with Roman 
mythology. The women who used to lay flowers in 
the Temple of Diana bring their lilies into the chapel 
of the Madonna. There are chapels for all the saints, 
for they have endowed their saints with the powers 
attributed to their numerous deities by the Greeks 
and the Romans. There are enough saints to go 
round — to meet all the requirements of the most 
freakish and exacting of district visitors. But the 
Jewish prophets were very different from the mysti- 
cal and mythical saints. They lived, and you feel 
when you get in touch with them that you are on a 
higher plane altogether." 

" Have you found out where you saw that Temple 
on the mound over there, and if you have, let us know 
the name of the god or the goddess or saint or saintess 
that it was dedicated to, and I'll try to pick up a 
Britannia metal figure cheap to put in the grove 
alongside the Greek vase," said I. 

He seemed in labour of thought: no one spoke for 
fear of interrupting the course of nature. 

" Let me think," he muttered. " I don't see why 
the mischief I should associate a Greek Temple with 
Oxford Street, but I do — that particular Temple of 
yours." 

" If you were a really religious business man you 
might be led to think of the City Temple, only it 
doesn't belong to the Greek Church," remarked 
Heywood. 

" Let me help you," said the Atheist's wife; " think 
of Truslove and Hanson, the booksellers. Did Arthur 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 135 

Rackham ever put a Temple into one of his picture- 
books?" 

" After all, you may have gone on to Holborn — 
Were you in Batsford's?" suggested Dorothy. 

" Don't bother about him," said I. " What does it 
matter if he did once see something like our Temple ; 
he'll never see anything like it again, unless " 

" It may have been Buszards' — a masterpiece of 
Buszards, — pure confectioners' Greek architecture — 
icing veined to look like marble," said Dorothy. 

" I have it — I knew I could worry it out if you gave 
me time," cried Friswell. 

" Which we did," said I. " Well, whisper it gently 
in our ears." 

" It was in a scene in a play at the Princess's 
Theatre," he cried triumphantly. " Yes, I recollect 
it distinctly — something just like your masterpiece, 
only more slavishly Greek — the scene was laid in 
Rome, so they would be sure to have it correct." 

" What play was it? " Dorothy asked. 

" Oh, now you're asking too much," he replied. 
"Who could remember the name of a play after 
thirty or forty years? All that I remember is that it 
was a thoroughly bad play with a Temple like yours 
in it. It was the fading of the light that brought 
it within the tentacles of my memory." 

" So like a man — to blame the dusk," said his 
wife. 

" The twilight is the time for a garden — the sum- 
mer twilight, like this," said Mr. Heywood. 

" The moonless midnight is the time for some 



136 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

gardens," said Dorothy, who is fastidious in many 
matters, though she did marry me. 

" The time for a garden was decided a long time 
ago," said I — " as long ago as the third chapter of 
Genesis and the eighth verse : ' They heard the voice 
of the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool 
of the day. ' " 

" You say that with a last-word air — as much as 
to say ' what's good enough for God is good enough 
for me,' " laughed Friswell. 

" I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of 
God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day," 
said Mrs. Friswell gently. 

" There are some people who would fail to hear it 
at any time," said I, pointedly referring to Friswell. 
He gave a laugh. " What are you guffawing at? " I 
cried with some asperity I trust. 

" Not at your Congregational platitudes," he re- 
plied. " I was led to smile when I remembered how 
the colloquial Bible which was compiled by a Scots- 
man, treated that beautiful passage. He paraphrased 
it, ' The Lord went oot in the gloamin' to hae a crack 
wi' Adam ower the garden gate.' " 

" I don't suppose he was thought irreverent," said 
Dorothy. " He wasn't really, you know." 

" To take a step or two in the other direction," said 
Mrs. Friswell; " I wonder if Milton had in his mind 
any of the Italian gardens he must have visited on 
his travels when he described the Garden of Eden." 

" There's not much of an Italian garden in Milton's 
Eden," said Dorothy, who is something of an author- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 137 

ity on these points. " But it is certainly an Italian 
twilight that he describes in one place. Poor Milton! 
he must have been living for many years in a per- 
petual twilight before it darkened into his perpetual 
night." 

" You notice the influence of the hour," said Hey- 
wood. " We have fallen into a twilight-shaded vale 
of converse. This is the hour when people talk in 
whispers in gardens like these." 

" I dare say we have all done so in our time," re- 
marked some one with a sentimental sigh that she 
tried in vain to smother. 

" Ah, God knew what He was about when He put a 
man and a woman into a garden alone, and gave them 
an admonition," said Friswell. " By the way, one of 
the most remarkable bits of testimony to the scien- 
tific accuracy of the Book of Genesis, seems to me to 
be the discovery, after many years of conjecture and 
vague theorising, that man and woman were originally 
one, so that the story of the formation of Eve by 
separating from Adam a portion of his body is scien- 
tifically true. I don't suppose that any of you good 
orthodox folk will take that in; but it is a fact all 
the same." 

" I will believe anything except a scientific fact," 
said Dorothy. 

" And I will believe nothing else," said Friswell. 
" The history of mankind begins with the creation of 
Eve — the separation of the two-sexed animal into two 
— meant a new world, a world worth writing about — 
a world of love." 



138 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" Listen to him — there's the effect of twilight in a 
Garden of Peace for you," said I. " Science and the 
Book of Genesis, hitherto at enmity, are at last recon- 
ciled by Atheist Friswell. What a triumph! What 
a pity that Milton, who made his Archangel visit 
Adam and his bride and give them a scientific lecture, 
did not live to learn all this ! " 

" He would have given us a Nonconformist account 
of it," said Mrs. Friswell. " I wonder how much his 
Archangel would have known if Milton had not first 
visited Charles Deodati." 

There was much more to be said in the twilight on 
the subject of the world of love — a world which seems 
the beginning of a new world to those who love ; and 
that was possibly why silence fell upon us and was 
only broken by the calling of a thrush from among 
the rhododendrons and the tapping of the rim of 
Heywood's empty pipe-bowl on the heel of his shoe. 
There was so much to be said, if we were the people 
to say it, on the subject of the new Earth which your 
lover knows to be the old Heaven, that, being aware 
of the inadequacy of human speech, we were silent 
for a long space. 

And when we began to talk again it was only to 
hark back from Nature to the theatre, and, a further 
decadence still — the Gardens of the Stage. 

The most effective garden scene in my recollection 
is that in which Irving and Ellen Terry acted when 
playing Wills' exquisite adaptation of King Rene's 
Daughter, which he called Iolanthe. I think it was 
Harker who painted it. The garden was outside a 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 139 

mediaeval castle, and the way its position on the sum- 
mit of a hill was suggested was an admirable bit of 
stagecraft. Among the serried lines of pines there 
was at first seen the faint pink of a sunset, and this 
gradually became a glowing crimson which faded 
away into the rich blue of an Italian twilight. But 
there was enough light to glint here and there upon 
the armour of the men-at-arms who moved about 
among the trees. 

The parterre in the foreground was full of red 
roses, and I remember that Mr. Ruskin, after seeing 
the piece and commenting upon the mise- en-scene, 
said that in such a light as was on it, the roses of the 
garden would have seemed black! 

This one-act play was brought on by Irving during 
the latter months of the great run of The Merchant of 
Venice. It showed in how true a spirit of loyalty to 
Shakespeare the last act, which, in nearly all repre- 
sentations of the play, is omitted, on the assumption 
that with the disappearance of Shylock there is no 
further element of interest in the piece, was retained 
by the great manager. It was retained only for the 
first few months, and it was delightfully played. The 
moonlit garden in which the incomparable lines of the 
poet were spoken was of the true Italian type, though 
there is nothing in the text of what is called " local 
colour." 

Juliet's garden on the same stage was not so defi- 
nitely Italian as it might have been. But I happen 
to know who were Irving's advisers. Among them 
were two of the most popular of English painters, 



140 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

and if they had had their own way Romeo would have 
been allowed no chance : he would have been hidden by 
the clumps of yew, and juniper, and oleander, and 
ilex, and pomegranate. A good many people who 
were present during the run of Romeo and Juliet 
were very much of the opinion that if this had taken 
place it would have been to the advantage of all con- 
cerned. Mr. Irving, as he was then, was not the ideal 
Romeo of the English playgoer. But neither was the 
original Romeo, who was, like the original Paolo, a 
man of something over forty. 

I have never seen it pointed out that a Romeo of 
forty would be quite consistent with the Capulet 
tradition, for Juliet's father in the play was quite an 
elderly man, whereas the mother was a young woman 
of twenty-eight. As for Juliet's age, it is usually 
made the subject of a note of comment to the effect 
that in the warm south a girl matures so rapidly that 
she is marriageable at Juliet's age of thirteen, whereas 
in the colder clime of England it would be ridiculous 
to talk of one marrying at such an age. 

There can be no doubt that in these less spacious 
days the idea of a bride of thirteen would not com- 
mend itself to parents or guardians, but in the six- 
teenth century, twelve or thirteen was regarded as 
the right age for the marriage of a girl. If she 
reached her sixteenth birthday remaining single, she 
was ready to join in the wail of Jephtha's Daughter. 
In a recently published letter written by Queen Eliza- 
beth, who, by the way, although fully qualified to take 
part in that chorale, seemed to find a series of diplo- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 141 

matic flirtations to be more satisfying than matrimony, 
she submitted the names of three heiresses as ripe for 
marriage, and none of them had passed the age of 
thirteen. The Reverend John Knox made his third 
matrimonial venture with a child of fifteen. Indeed, 
one has only to search the records of any family of 
the sixteenth or seventeenth century to be made aware 
of the fact that Shakespeare's Juliet was not an ex- 
ceptionally youthful bride. In Tenbury Church there 
is a memorial of " Ioyse, d. of Thos. Actone of 
Sutton, Esquire." She was the wife of Sir Thomas 
Lucy, whom she married at the age of twelve. If 
any actor, however, were to appear as a forty-two 
year Romeo and with a Juliet of thirteen, and a lady- 
mother of twenty-eight, he would be optimistic indeed 
if he should hope for a long run for his venture. 

Of course with the boy Juliets of the Globe Theatre, 
the younger they were the better chance they would 
have of carrying conviction with them. A Juliet with 
a valanced cheek would not be nice, even though she 
were " nearer heaven by the attitude of a chopine " 
than one whose face was smooth. 

I think that Irving looked his full age when he took 
it upon him to play Romeo; but to my mind he made 
a more romantic figure than most Romeos whom I 
have seen. But every one who joined in criticising 
the representation seemed unable to see more of him 
than his legs, and these were certainly fantastic. I 
maintained that such people began at the wrong end 
of the actor: they should have begun at the head. 
And this was the hope of Irving himself. He had the 



142 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

intellect, and I thought his legs extremely intel- 
lectual. 

I wonder he did not do some padding to bring his 
calves into the market, and make — as he would have 
done — a handsome profit out of the play. In the old 
days of the Bateman Management of the Lyceum, 
he was never permitted to ignore the possibilities of 
making up for deficiencies of Nature. In the estima- 
tion of the majority of theatre-goers, the intellect of 
an actor will never make up for any neglect of the 
adventitious aid of " make-up." When Eugene Aram 
was to be produced, it was thought advisable to do 
some padding to make Irving presentable. There 
was a clever expert at this form of expansion con- 
nected with the theatre ; he was an Italian and, speak- 
ing no English, he was forced into an experiment in 
explanation in his own language. He wished to en- 
force the need for a solid shape to fit the body, rather 
than a patchwork of padding. In doing so he had to 
made constant use of the word corpo, and as none of 
his hearers understood Italian, they thought that he 
was giving a name to the contrivance he had in his 
mind; so when the thing passed out of the mental 
stage into the actor's dressing-room, it was alluded to 
as the corpo. The name seemed a happy one and it 
had a certain philological justification; for several 
people, including the dresser, thought that corpo was 
a contraction for corporation, and in the slang of the 
day, that meant an expansion of the chest a little lower 
down. 

Mrs. Bateman, with whom and with whose family 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 143 

I was intimate, told me this long after the event, and, 
curiously enough, it arose out of a conversation going 
on among some visitors to the house in Ensleigh 
Street where Mrs. Bateman and her daughters were 
living. I said I thought the most expressive line ever 
written was that in the Inferno which ended the ex- 
quisite Francesca episode: — 

" E caddi come un corpo morto cade." 

Mrs. Bateman and her daughter Kate (Mrs. 
Crowe) looked at each other and smiled. I thought 
that they had probably had the line quoted to them 
ad nauseam, and I said so. 

" That is not what we were smiling at," said Mrs. 
Bateman. " It was at the recollection of the word 
corpo." 

And then she told me the foregoing. 

Only a short time afterwards in the same house 
she gave me a bit of information of a much more 
interesting sort. 

I had been at the first performance of Wills' play 
Ninon at the Adelphi theatre, and was praising the 
acting of Miss Wallis and Mr. Fernandez. When I 
was describing one scene, Mrs. Bateman said, — 

" I recollect that scene very well ; Mr. Wills read 
that play to us when he was writing Charles I.; but 
there was no part in it strong enough for Mr. Irving. 
He heard it read, however, and was greatly taken 
with some lines in it — so greatly in fact that Mr. Wills 
found a place for them in Charles Z. They are the 



144 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

lines of the King's upbraiding of the Scotch traitor, 
beginning, ' I saw a picture of a Judas once.' Some 
people thought them among the finest in the play." 

I said that I was certainly among them. 

That was how they made up a play which is cer- 
tainly one of the most finished dramas in verse of the 
latter half of the nineteenth century. 

It was Irving himself who told me something more 
about the same play. The subject had been suggested 
to Wills and he set about it with great fervour. He 
brought the first act to the Lyceum conclave. It 
opened in the banqueting hall of some castle, with a 
score of the usual cavaliers having the customary 
carouse, throwing about wooden goblets, and tossing 
off bumpers between the verses of some stirring s r igs 
of the type of " Oh, fill me a beaker as deep as you 
please," leading up to the unavoidable brawl and the 
timely entrance of the King. 

" It was exactly the opposite to all that I had in 
my mind," Irving told me, " and I would have noth- 
ing to do with it. I wanted the domestic Charles, with 
his wife and children around him, and I would have 
nothing else." 

Happily he had his own way, and with the help of 
the fine lines transferred from Ninon, the play was 
received with acclamation, and, finely acted as it is 
now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never fails 
to move an audience. 

I think it was John Clayton who was the original 
Oliver Cromwell. I was told that his make-up was 
one of the most realistic ever seen. He was Cromwell 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 145 

— to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his 
dressing-room was lost in admiration of the perfection 
of the picture, and declared that the painter should 
sign it in the corner, " John Clayton, pinx." But 
perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne. 

Only one more word in the Bateman connection. 
The varying fortunes of the family are well known — 
how the Bateman children made a marvellous success 
for a time — how the eldest, Kate, played for months 
and years in Leah, filling the treasury of every theatre 
in England and America — how when the Lyceum was 
at the point of closing its odors, The Bells rang in 
an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't 
suppose that many people know that Mrs. Bateman, 
the wife of " The Colonel," was the author of several 
novels which she wrote for newspapers at one of the 
" downs " that preceded the " ups " in her life. 

And Compton Mackenzie is Mrs. Bateman's grand- 
son! 

And Fay Compton is Compton Mackenzie's young- 
est sister. 

There is heredity for you. 



CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 

It was melancholy — but Atheist Friswell alone was 
to blame for it — that we should sit out through that 
lovely evening and talk about tawdry theatricals, and 
that same tawdriness more than a little musty through 
time. If Friswell had not begun with his nonsense 
about having seen my Temple somewhere down 
Oxford Street we should never have wandered from 
the subject of gardens until we lost ourselves among 
the wings of the Lyceum and its " profiles " of its 
pines in Iolanthe, and its " built " yews and pome- 
granates in Romeo and Juliet. But among the per- 
fume of the roses surrounding us, with an occasional 
whiff of the lavender mound and a gracious breath 
like that of 

" The sweet South 
That breathes upon a bank of violets 
Giving and taking odours," 

we continued talking of theatres until the summer 
night was reeking with the smell of sawdust and 
oranges, to say nothing of the fragrance of the poudre 
de. ninon of the stalls, wafted over opera wraps and 
diamond-studded shirt-fronts — diamond studs, when 
just over the glimmering marble of my temple the 
Evening Star was glowing! 

146 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 147 

But what had always been a mystery to Friswell 
as the extraordinary lack of judgment on Irving's 
part in choosing his plays. Had he ever made a suc- 
cess since he produced that adaptation of Faust? 

Beautifully staged and with some splendid mo- 
ments due to the genius of the man himself and the 
never-failing charm of the actress with whom he was 
associated in all, yet no play worth remembering was 
produced at the Lyceum during that management. 
Faust made money, as it always has since the days 
of Marlowe; but all those noisy scenes and meaning- 
less moments on the misty mountains — only allitera- 
tion's artful aid can deal adequately with such di- 
gressions from the story of Faust and Gretchen which 
was all that theatregoers, even of the better class, 
who go to the pit, wanted — seemed dragged into the 
piece without reason or profit. To be sure, pages 
and pages of Goethe's Faust are devoted to his at- 
tempt to give concreteness to abstractions. (That 
was Friswell's phrase; and I repeat it for what it is 
worth) . But in the original all these have a meaning 
at the back of them ; but Irving only brought them on 
to abandon them after a line or two. The hope to 
gain the atmosphere of the weird by means of a pano- 
rama of clouds and mountain peaks may have been 
realised so far as some sections of the audience were 
concerned; but such a manager as Henry Irving 
should have been above trying for such cheap effects. 
Faust made money, however, and helped materially 
to promote the formation of the Company through 
which country clergymen and daily governesses in 



148 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the provinces hoped to advance the British Drama 
and earn 20 per cent, dividends. 

I was at the first night of every play produced at 
the Lyceum for over twenty years, and I knew that 
Irving never fell short of the highest and the truest 
possible conception of any part that he attempted. 
At his best he was unapproachable. It was not the 
actor who failed, when there was failure; it was the 
play that failed. Only one marvellously inartistic 
feature was in the adaptation of The Courier of 
Lyons. He assumed that the sole way by which 
identification of a man is possible is by his appearance 
— that the intonation of his voice counts for nothing 
whatsoever. He acted in the dual role of Dubosc and 
Lesurges — the one a gentle creature with a gentle 
voice, the other a truculent ruffian who jerked out his 
words hoarsely — the very antithesis to the mild 
gentleman in voice, in gait, and in general demeanour, 
though closely resembling him in features and ap- 
pearance. The impression given by this representa- 
tion was that any one who, having heard Dubosc 
speak, would mistake Lesurges for him must be either 
stone-deaf or an idiot. But each of the parts was 
finely played; and the real old stage-coach arriving 
with its team smoking like Sheffield, helped to make 
a commonplace melodrama interesting. 

Personally I do not think that he was justified in 
trying to realise at the close of the trial scene in The 
Merchant of Venice, the tableau of Christ standing 
mute and patient among the mockers. It was an 
attempt to obtain by suggestion some pity and sym- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 149 

pathy for an infamous and inhuman scoundrel. In 
that pictorial moment Shylock the Jew was made to 
pose as Christ the Jew. 

Mrs. Friswell had not seen Irving's Shylock, but 
she expressed her belief that Shylock was on the 
whole very badly treated; and Dorothy was ready to 
affirm that Antonio was lacking in those elements 
that go to the composition of a sportsman. He should 
not have wriggled out of his bargain by the chicanery 
of the law. 

" They were a bad lot, and that's a fact," I ven- 
tured to say. 

" They were," acquiesced Friswell. " And if you 
look into the history of the Jews, they were also a 
bad lot ; but among them were the most splendid men 
recorded as belonging to any race ever known on this 
earth; and I'm not sure that Irving wasn't justified 
in trying to get his audiences to realise in that last 
moment something of the dignity of the Hebrew 
people." 

" He would have made a more distinct advance in 
that direction if he had cut out the ' business ' of 
stropping his knife a few minutes earlier, ' To cut the 
forfeiture from that bankrupt there,' " I remarked. 

" If he had done that Shakespeare would not have 
had the chance of his pun — the cheapest pun in litera- 
ture — and it would not be like the author to have neg- 
lected that," said Mrs. Friswell. 

They all seemed to know more of the play than I 
gave them credit for knowing. 

It was Heywood who inquired if I remembered 



150 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

another of living's plays at the close of which a sec- 
ond greatly misjudged character had appealed for 
sympathy by adopting the same pose. 

Of course I did — I remembered it very distinctly. 
It was in Peter the Great, that the actor, waiting with 
sublime resignation to hear the heart-rending death- 
shriek of his son whom he had condemned to drink a 
cup of cold poison, is told by a hurrying messenger 
that his illegitimate child has just died — then came the 
hideous shriek, and the actor, with his far-away look 
of patient anguish, spoke his words, — 

"Then I am childless!" 

And the curtain fell. 

He appealed for sympathy on precisely the same 
grounds as were suggested by the prisoner at the 
bar who had killed his father with a hatchet, and on 
being convicted by the jury and asked by the judge 
if he could advance any plea whereby the sentence of 
death should not be pronounced upon him, said he 
hoped that his lordship would not forget that he was 
an orphan. 

In this drama the first act was played with as much 
jingling of sleigh-bells as took place in another and 
rather better known piece in the repertoire of the same 
actor. 

But whatever were its shortcomings, Peter the 
Great showed that poor Lawrence Irving could write, 
and write well, and that he might one day give to 
the English theatre a great drama. 

Irving was accused of neglecting English authors ; 
but the accusation was quite unjust. He gave several 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 151 

of them a chance. There was, of course, W. G. Wills, 
who was a true dramatist, and showed it in those plays 
to which I have referred. But it must not be for- 
gotten that he produced a play by Mr. H. D. Traill 
and Mr. Robert Hitchens, and another by Herman 
Merrivale; Mr. J. Comyns Carr took in hand the fin- 
ishing of King Arthur, begun by Wills, and made it 
ridiculous, and helped in translating and adapting 
Madame Sans Gene. Might not Lord Tennyson also 
be called an English author? and were not his three 
plays, Queen Mary, The Cup, and Becket brought 
out at the Lyceum? Irving showed me how he had 
made the last-named playable, and I confess that I 
was astonished. There was not a single page of the 
book remaining untouched when he had done with it. 
Speech after speech was transferred from one act to 
another, and the sequence of the scenes was altered, 
before the drama was made possible. But when he 
had finished with it Becket was not only possible and 
playable, it was the noblest and the best constructed 
drama in verse that the stage had seen for years. 

I asked him what Lord Tennyson had said about 
this chopping and changing; but he did not give me 
a verbatim account of the poet's greeting of his off- 
spring in its stage dress — he only smiled as one smiles 
under the influence of a reminiscence of something 
that is better over. 

When he went to Victorien Sardou for a new play 
and got Robespierre, Irving got the worst thing that 
he had produced up to that date; but when he went 
a second time and got Dante, he got something worse 



152 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

still. Sir Arthur Pinero's letter acknowledging the 
debt incurred by the dramatists of England to M. 
Sardou for showing them how a play should be writ- 
ten was a masterpiece of irony. 

The truth is that Irving was the greatest of Eng- 
lish actors, and he was at his best only when he was 
interpreting the best. When he was acting Shake- 
speare he was supreme. In scenes of passion he dif- 
fered from most actors. They could show a passion 
in the hands of a man, he showed the man in the hands 
of a passion. And what actor could have represented 
Corporal Brewster in Waterloo as Irving did? 

About the changes that we veterans have seen in 
the stage during the forty years of our playgoing, we 
agree that one of the most remarkable is the intro- 
duction of parsons and pyjamas, and of persons with 
a past. All these glories of the modern theatre were 
shut out from the theatres of forty years ago. When 
an adaptation of Dora by the author of Fedora and 
Theodora was made for the English stage under the 
name of Diplomacy, the claim that the Countess with 
a past had upon the Diplomatist who is going to 
marry — really marry — another woman, was turned 
into a claim that she had " nursed him through a long 
illness." The censor of those days thought that that 
was quite as far as any one should go in that direc- 
tion. It was assumed that La Dame auoo Camillas 
could never be adapted without being offensive to a 
pure-minded English audience. I think that A Cleri- 
cal Error was the first play in which a clergyman of 
the Church of England was given the entree to a 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 153 

theatre in London. To be sure, there were priests of 
the Church of Rome in Dion Boucicault's Irish plays, 
but they were not supposed to count. I heard that 
Mr. Pigott, the Censor, only passed the parson in A 
Clerical Error on the plea of the young nurse for 
something equally forbidden, in Midshipman Easy, 
that " it was a very little one." But from that day 
until now we have had parsons by the score, ladies 
wearing camellias and little else, by the hundred. As 
for the pyjama drama, I don't suppose that any man- 
ager would so much as read a play that had not this 
duplex garment in one scene. I will confess that I 
once wrote a story for Punch with a pyjama chorus in 
it. If it was from this indiscretion that a manager 
conceived the idea of a ballet founded on the same 
costume I have something to answer for. 

But in journalism and literature a corresponding 
change has come about, only more recently. It is 
not more than ten or twelve years since certain words 
have enjoyed the liberty of the press. In a police- 
court case the word that the ruffian in the dock hurled 
at a policeman was represented thus — " d — n," telling 

him to go to " h " ; no respectable newspaper 

would ever put in the final letter. 

But now we have had the highest examples of 
amalgamated newspapers printing the name of the 
place that was to be found in neither gazette nor 
gazetteer, in bold type at the head of a column, and 
that too in connection with the utterance of a Prime 
Minister. As for the d — n of ten years ago, no one 
could have believed that Bob Acres' thoughtless as- 



154 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

sertion that " damns have had their day," should be 
so luridly disproved. Why, they have only now come 
into their inheritance. This is the day of the damn. 
It occupies the Plac& auoc Dames of Victorian times ; 
and now one need not hope to be able to pick up a 
paper or a book that has not most of its pages 
sprinkled with damns and hells as plentifully as a 
devil is sprinkled with cayenne. I am sure that in the 
cookery books of our parents the treatment of a 
devilled bone would not be found, or if the more con- 
scientious admitted it, we should find it put, " how to 
cook a d bone," or, " another way," as the cook- 
ery book would put it more explicitly, " a d — d bone." 

" It is satisfactory to learn that the Church which 
so long enjoyed the soul right to the property in these 
words, has relinquished its claim and handed over the 
title deeds of the freehold, with all the patronage that 
was supposed to go with it," said Friswell. " I read 
in the papers the other day that the Archbishop had 
received the report of the Committee he appointed to 
inquire into the rights of both words, and this recom- 
mended the abolition of both words in the interpreta- 
tion accepted for them for centuries in religious com- 
munities; and in future damnation is to be taken to 
mean only something that does not commend itself 
to all temperaments, and hell is no more than a pic- 
turesque but insanitary dwelling." 

" I read something like that the other day," said 
Dorothy. " But surely they have not gone so far as 
you say." 

" They have gone to a much more voluminous. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 155 

distance, I assure you," said he. " It is to enable us 
all to say the Athanasian Creed without our tongue 
in our cheek. Quicunque vult may repeat ' Qui- 
cunque Vult ' with a full assurance that nothing 
worth talking about will happen." 

" All the Bishops' Committees in the world cannot 
rob us Englishmen of our heritage in those words," 
I cried, feeling righteously angry at the man's flip- 
pancy. " If they were to take that from us, what can 
they give us in its place — tell me that? " 

" Oh, there is still one word in the same connection 
that they have been afraid to touch," said he cheer- 
fully. " Thank Heaven we have still got that to 
counteract any tendency of our language to become 
anaemic." 



CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 

I had been practically all my life enjoying gardens 
of various kinds, but I had given attention to their 
creations without giving a thought to their creation; 
I had taken the gifts of Flora, I would have said if I 
had been writing a hundred years ago, without study- 
ing the features or the figure of the goddess herself. 
If I were hard pressed for time and space I would 
say directly that I lived among flowers, but knew 
nothing of gardens. I had never troubled myself to 
inquire into the details of a garden's charm. I had 
watched gardeners working and idling, mowing and 
watering, tying up and cutting down, but I had never 
had a chance of watching a real gardener making a 
garden. 

It is generally assumed that the first gardener that 
the world has known was Adam. A clergyman told 
me so with the smile that comes with the achievement 
of a satisfactory benefice — the indulgent smile of the 
higher criticism for the Book of Genesis. But people 
who agree with that assumption cannot have read 
the Book with the attention it deserves, or they would 
have seen that it was the Creator of all Who planted 
the first garden, and there are people alive to-day 
who are ready to affirm that He worked conscien- 

156 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 157 

tiously on the lines laid down by Le Notre. Most 
gardeners whom I have seen at work appeared to me 
to be well aware of the fact that the garden was given 
to man as a beatitude, and that agriculture came later 
and in the form of a Curse; and in accordance with 
this assurance they decline to labour in such a way as 
to make the terms of the Curse apply to themselves. 
If they wipe their brows with their shirt-sleeve, it is 
only because that is the traditional movement which 
precedes the consulting of their watch to see if that 
five minutes before the striking of the stable clock 
for the dinner hour will allow of their putting on their 
coats. 

A friend of mine who had been reading Darwin and 
Wallace and Lyell and Huxley and the rest of them, 
greatly to the detriment of his interpretation of some 
passages in the Pentateuch, declared that the record 
of the incident of the Garden Designer in the first 
chapters of Genesis, being unable to do anything with 
his gardener and being obliged (making use of a 
Shakespearian idiom) to fire him out, showed such a 
knowledge of the trade, that, Darwin or no Darwin, 
he would accept the account of the transaction with- 
out reservation. 

The saying that God sent food but the devil sent 
cooks may be adapted to horticulture, as a rule, I 
think; but it should certainly not be applied indis- 
criminately. The usual " jobber " is a man from 
whom employers expect a great deal but get very 
little that is satisfactory. That is because employers 
are unreasonable. The ordinary " working gar- 



158 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

dener " does not think, because he is not paid to think: 
he does not get the wages of a man who is required to 
use his brain. When one discovers all that a gardener 
should know, and learns that the average wage of the 
trade is from one pound to thirty shillings a week, the 
unreasonableness of expecting a high order of intelli- 
gence to be placed at your service for such pay will be 
apparent. 

Of course a " head " at an establishment where he 
is called a " curator " and has half a dozen assistants, 
gets a decent salary and fully earns it; but the pay 
of the greater number of the men who call themselves 
gardeners is low out of all proportion to what their 
qualifications should be. 

Now this being so, is the improvement to come by 
increasing the wages of the usual type of garden job- 
ber? I doubt it. My experience leads me to believe 
very strongly in the employer's being content with 
work only, and in his making no demand for brains 
or erudition from the man to whom he pays twenty- 
five shillings a week — pre-war rates, of course: the 
war-time equivalent would, of course, be something 
like £2 5s. — the brains and erudition should be pro- 
vided by himself. The employer or some member of 
his family should undertake the direction of the work 
and ask for the work only from the man. 

I know that the war days were the means of devel- 
oping this system beyond all that one thought pos- 
sible five or six years ago; and of one thing I am 
sure, and this is that no one who has been compelled 
to " take up " his own garden will ever go back to the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 159 

old way, the leading note of which was the morning 
grumble at the inefficiency of the gardener, and the 
evening resolution to fire him out. The distinction 
between exercise and work has, within the past few 
fateful years, been obliterated; and it has become ac- 
cepted generally that to sweat over the handle of a 
lawnmower is just as ennobling as to perspire for over 
after over at a bowling crease ; and that the man who 
comes in earth-stained from his allotment, is not 
necessarily the social inferior of the man who carries 
away on his knees a sample of the soil of the football 
field. There may be a distinction between the work 
and the play; but it is pretty much the same as the 
difference between the Biblical verb to sweat and the 
boudoir word to perspire. The pores are opened by 
the one just as healthfully as by the other. And in 
future I am pretty sure that we shall all sweat and 
rarely perspire. 

I need not give any of the " instances " that have 
come under my notice of great advantage accruing 
to the garden as well as to the one who gardens 
without an indifferent understudy — every one who 
reads this book is in a position to supply such an 
omission. I am sure that there is no country town or 
village that cannot mention the name of some family, 
a member or several members of which have been 
hard at work raising flowers or vegetables or grow- 
ing fruit, with immediately satisfactory results, and a 
prospect of something greatly in advance in the 
future. 

I am only in a position to speak definitely on be- 



160 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

half of the working proprietor, but I am certain that 
the daughters of the house who have been working so 
marvellously for the first time in their lives, at the 
turning out of munitions, taking the place of men in 
fields and byres, and doing active duties in connection 
with hospitals, huts, and canteens, will not now be 
content to go back to their tennis and teas and " dis- 
tricts " as before. They will find their souls in other 
and more profitable directions, and it is pretty certain 
that the production of food will occupy a large num- 
ber of the emancipated ones. We shall have vege- 
tables and fruit and eggs in such abundance as was 
never dreamt of four years ago. Why, already potato 
crops of twelve tons to the acre are quite common, 
whereas an aggregate of eight and nine tons was con- 
sidered very good in 1912. We all know the improve- 
ment that has been brought about in regard to poul- 
try, in spite of the weathercockerel admonition of the 
Department of the Government, which one month 
sent out a million circulars imploring all sorts and 
conditions of people to keep poultry, and backed this 
up with a second million advising the immediate 
slaughter of all fowls who had a fancy for cereals as 
a food; the others were to be fed on the crumbs that 
fell from the master's table, but if the master were 
known to give the crumbs to birds instead of eating 
them himself or making them into those poultices, 
recommended by another Department that called 
them puddings, he would be prosecuted. Later on 
we were to be provided with a certain amount of stuff 
for pure bred fowls, in order that only the purest and 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 161 

best strains should be kept; but no provision in the 
way of provisions was made for the cockerels! The 
cockerels were to be discouraged, but the breeding of 
pure fowls was to be encouraged! 

It took another million or so of buff Orpington 
circulars to explain just what was meant by the De- 
partment, and even then it needed a highly-trained 
intelligence to explain the explanation. 

When we get rid of these clogs to industry known 
as Departments, we shall, I am sure, all work together 
to the common good, in making England a self-sup- 
porting country, and the men and women of Eng- 
land a self-respecting people, and in point of health 
an A 1 people instead of the C 3 into which we are 
settling down complacently. The statistics of the 
grades recently published appeared to me to be the 
greatest cause for alarm that England has known for 
years. And the worst of the matter is that when 
one asks if a more ample proof of decadence has ever 
been revealed, people smile and inquire if the result of 
the recent visits of the British to France and Italy 
and Palestine and Mesopotamia suggest any evidence 
of decadence. They forget that it was only the A 
classes that left England; only the A classes were 
killed or maimed ; the lower grades remained at home 
with their wives in order that the decadent breed 
might be carried on with emphasised decadence. 

If I were asked in what direction one should look 
for the salvation of the race from the rush into Aver- 
nus toward which we have been descending, I would 
certainly say, — 



162 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" The garden and the allotment only will arrest our 
feet on the downward path." 

If the people of England can throw off the yoke of 
the Cinema and take to the spade it may not yet be 
too late to rescue them from the abyss toward which 
they are sliding. 

And it is not merely the sons who must be saved, 
the daughters must be taken into account in this di- 
rection ; and when I meet daily the scores of trim and 
shapely girls with busts of Venus and buskins of 
Diana, walking — vera incessu patuit dea — as if the 
land belonged to them — which it does — I feel no un- 
easiness with regard to the women with whom Eng- 
land's future rests. If they belong to the land, 
assuredly the land belongs to them. 

But the garden and not the field is the place for our 
girls. We know what the women are like in those 
countries where they work in the fields doing men's 
work. We have seen them in Jean Francois Millet's 
pictures, and we turn from them with tears. 

" Women with labour-loosened knees 

And gaunt backs bowed with servitude." 

We do not wish to see them in England. I have seen 
them in Italy, in Switzerland, and on the Boer farms 
in South Africa. I do not want to see them in Eng- 
land. 

Agriculture is for men, horticulture for women. A 
woman is in her right place in a garden. A garden 
looks lovelier for her presence. What an incongruous 
object a jobbing gardener in his shirt-sleeves and 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 163 

filthy cap seems when seen against a background of 
flowers! I have kept out of my garden for days in 
dread of coming upon the figure which I knew was 
lurking there, spending his time looking out for me 
and working feverishly when he thought I was com- 
ing. 

But how pleasantly at home a girl in her garden 
garb appears, whether on the rungs of a ladder tying 
up the roses, or doing some thinning out on a too 
rampant border! There should be no work in a 
garden beyond her powers — that is, of course, in a 
one-gardener garden — a one-greenhouse garden. She 
has no business trying to carry a tub with a shrub 
weighing one hundred and fifty pounds from one 
place to another; but she can wheel a brewer's or a 
coalman's sack barrow with two nine-inch wheels with 
two hundredweight resting on it for half a mile with- 
out feeling weary. No garden should be without such 
a vehicle. One that I bought ten years ago from a 
general dealer has enabled me to superannuate the 
cumbersome wheelbarrow. You require to lift the 
tub into the wheelbarrow, but the other does the lift- 
ing when you push the iron guard four inches under 
the staves at the bottom. As for that supposed bug- 
bear — the carting of manure, it should not exist in a 
modern garden. A five-shilling tin of fertiliser and a 
few sacks of Wakeley's hop mixture will be enough 
for the borders of a garden of an acre, unless you aim 
at growing everything to an abnormal size. But you 
must know what sort of fertilising every bed requires. 

I mention these facts because we read constantly 



164 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

of the carting of manure being beyond the limits of 
a girl-gardener's strength, to say nothing of the dis- 
tasteful character of the job. The time is coming 
when there will be none of the old-fashioned stable- 
sweepings either for the garden or the field, and I 
think we shall get on very well without it, unless we 
wish to grow mushrooms. 

The only other really horrid job that I would not 
have my girl face is pot-washing. This is usually a 
winter job, because, we are told, summer is too busy 
a time in the garden to allow of its being done except 
when the ice has to be broken in the cistern and no 
other work is possible. But why should the pots be 
washed out of doors and in cold water? If you have 
a girl-gardener, why should you not give her the free- 
dom of the scullery sink where the hot water is laid 
on? There is no hardship in washing a couple of 
hundred pots in hot water and in a warm scullery on 
the most inclement day in January. 

The truth is that there exists a garden tradition, 
and it originated with men who had neither imagina- 
tion nor brains, and people would have us believe that 
it must be maintained — that frogs and toads should be 
slain and that gardener is a proper noun of the mas- 
culine gender — that manure must be filthy and that 
a garden should never look otherwise than unfinished 
at any time of the year — that radiation is the same as 
frost, and that watering should be done regularly 
and without reference to the needs of the individual 
plants. 

Lady Wolseley has done a great deal toward giv- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 165 

ing girls the freedom of the garden. She has a small 
training ground on the motor road between Lewes 
and Eastbourne. Of course it is not large enough to 
pay its way, and I am told that in order to realise 
something on the produce, the pony cart of a coster- 
monger in charge of two of the young women goes 
into Lewes laden with vegetables for sale. I have no 
doubt that the vegetables are of the highest grade, 
but I am afraid that if it becomes understood that the 
pupils are to be trained in the arts of costermongery 
the prestige of her college, as it has very properly 
been called by Lady Wolseley, will suffer. 

What I cannot understand is why, with so ad- 
mirable a work being done at that place, it should not 
be subsidised by the State. It may be, however, that 
Lady Wolseley has had such experience of the way in 
which the State authorities mismanage almost every- 
thing they handle, as prevents her from moving in 
this direction. The waste, the incompetence, and the 
arrogance of all the Departments that sprang into 
existence with the war are inconceivable. I dare say 
that Lady Wolseley has seen enough during the past 
four years to convince her that if once the " State " 
had a chance of putting a controlling finger upon one 
of the reins of the college pony it would upset the 
whole apple-cart. The future of so valuable an in- 
stitution should not be jeopardised by the intrusion 
of the fatal finger of a Government Department. 
The Glynde College should be the Norland Institu- 
tion of the nursery of Flora. 



CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH 

It was when a gardener with whom I had never ex- 
changed a cross word during the two years he was 
with me assured me that work was not work but 
slavery in my garden — he had one man under him and 
appealed to me for a second — that I made my apol- 
ogy to him and allowed him to take unlimited leave 
of me and his shackles. He had been with me for 
over two years, and during all this time the garden 
had been going from bad to worse. At the end of 
his bondage it was absolutely deplorable. At no time 
had we the courage to ask any visitor to walk round 
the grounds. 

And yet the man knew the Latin name of every 
plant and every flower from the cedar on the lawn 
to the snapdragon — he called it antirrhinum — upon 
the wall ; but if he had remained with me much longer 
there would have been nothing left for him to give a 
name to, Latin or English. 

I took over the garden and got in a boy to do the 
pot-washing at six shillings a week, and a fortnight 
later I doubled his wages, so vast a change, or rather, 
a promise of change, as was shown by the place. 
Within a month I was paying him fifteen shillings, 
and within six months, eighteen. He was an excellent 

166 



A GAKDEN OF PEACE 167 

lad, and in due time his industry was rewarded by the 
hand of our cook. I parted with him reluctantly at 
the outbreak of the war, though owing to physical 
defects he was never called up. 

It was when I was thrown on my own resources 
after the strain of leave-taking with my slave-driven 
professor that I acquired the secret of garden design 
which I have already revealed — namely, the multiply- 
ing of " features " within the garden space. 

It took time for me to carry out my plans, for I 
was very far from seeing, as a proper garden designer 
would have done in a glance, how the ground lent 
itself to " features " in various directions; and it was 
only while I was working at one part that the possi- 
bilities of others suggested themselves to me. It was 
the incident of my picking up in a stonemason's yard 
for a few shillings a doorway with a shaped archi- 
trave, that made me think of shutting off the House 
Garden, which I had completed the previous year, 
from the rest. I got this work done quite satisfac- 
torily by the aid of a simple balustrade on each side. 
Here there was an effective entrance to a new garden, 
where before nothing would grow owing to the over- 
shadowing by the sycamores beyond my mound. My 
predecessor took refuge in a grove of euonyma, be- 
hind which he artfully concealed the stone steps lead- 
ing to the Saxon terrace. This was one of the " fea- 
tures " of his day — the careful concealing of such 
drawbacks in the landscape as stone steps. But as 
I could not see that they were after all a fatal blot 
that should put an end to all hope to make anything 



168 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

of the place, I pulled away the masses of euonyma, 
and turned the steps boldly round, adding piers at the 
foot. 

Here then was at my command a space of forty 
feet square, walled in, and in the summer-shade of the 
high sycamores, and the winter-shade of a beautifully- 
shaped and immense deciduous oak. And what was 
I to do with it? 

Before I left the interrogatory ground I saw with 
great clearness the reflection of the graceful foliage 
in a piece of water. That was just what was needed 
at the place, I was convinced — a properly puddled 
Sussex dew-pond such as Gilbert White's swallows 
could hardly resist making their winter quarters as 
the alternative to that long and tedious trip to South 
Africa. The spot was clearly designed by Nature as 
a basin. On three sides it had boundaries of sloping 
mounds, and I felt myself equal to the business of 
completing the circle so that the basin would be in its 
natural place. 

I consulted my builder as to whether or not my 
plan was a rightly puddled one — which was a way of 
asking if it would hold water in a scientific as well 
as a metaphorical sense. He advised concrete, and 
concrete I ordered, though I was quite well aware of 
the fact that in doing so I must abandon all hopes 
of the swallows, for I knew that with concrete there 
would be none of that mud in the pond which the 
great naturalists had agreed was indispensable for the 
hibernating of the birds. 

A round pond basin was made, about fifteen feet 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 169 

in diameter, and admirably made too. In the centre 
I created an island with the nozzle of a single jet 
d'eau, carefully concealed, and by an extraordinary 
chance I discovered within an inch or two of the brim 
of the basin, the channel of an ancient scheme of 
drainage — it may have been a thousand years old — 
and this solved in a moment the problem of how to 
carry off the overflow. The water was easily avail- 
able from the ordinary " Company's " pipe for the 
garden supply; so that all that remained for me to do 
was to tidy up the ground, which I did by getting six 
tons of soft reddish sandstone from a neighbouring 
quarry and piling it in irregular masses on two sectors 
of the circular space, taking care to arrange for a 
scheme of " pockets " for small plants at one part and 
for large ferns at another. The greatest elevation of 
this boundary was about fifteen feet, and here I put a 
noble cliff weighing a ton and a half, with several 
irregular steps at the base, the lowest being just 
above a series of stone rectangular basins, connected 
by irregular shallow channels in a descent to the big 
pond. Then I got a leaden pipe with an " elbow " 
attachment to the Company's water supply beneath, 
and contrived a sort of T-shaped spray which I con- 
cealed on the level of the top of my cliff, and within 
forty-eight hours I had a miniature cascade pouring 
over the cliff and splashing among the stone basins 
and their channels — <c per aver' pace coi seguaci sui " 
— in the large pond below. 

Of course it took a summer and a winter to give 
this little scheme a chance of assimilating with Nature ; 



170 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

but once it began to do so it did so thoroughly. The 
cliff and the rocky steps, which I had made in mem- 
ory of the cascade at Platte Klip on the side of Table 
Mountain where I had often enjoyed a bath, became 
beautifully slimy, and primroses were blooming so 
as to hide the outlines of the rectangle, while Alpines 
and sedums and harts-tongue ferns found accommo- 
dation in the pockets among the stones. In the course 
of another year the place was covered with vegetation 
and the sandstones had become beautifully weathered, 
and sure enough, the boughs of the American oak had 
their Narcissus longings realised, but without the 
Narcissus sequel. 

Here, then, was a second " feature " accomplished; 
and we walk out of the sunshine of the House Garden, 
and, passing through the carved stone doorway, find 
ourselves in complete shade with the sound of tinkling 
water in the air — when the taps are turned in the right 
direction ; but in the matter of water we are economi- 
cal, and the cascade ceased to flow while the war 
lasted. 

I do not think that it is wrong to try to achieve 
such contrasts in designing a range of gardens. The 
effect is great and it will never appear to be cheap, 
provided that it is carried out naturally. I do not 
think that in a place of the character of that just 
described one should introduce such objects as shrubs 
in tubs, or clipped trees; nor should one tolerate the 
appearance for the sake, perhaps, of colour, of any 
plant or flower that might not be found in the natural 
scene on which it is founded. We all know that in 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 171 

a rocky glen we need not look for brilliant colour, 
therefore the introduction of anything striking in this 
way would be a jarring note. To be sure I have seen 
the irrepressible scarlet geranium blazing through 
some glens in the island of St. Helena; but St. 
Helena is in the tropics, and a tropical glen is not the 
sort to which we have become accustomed in England. 
If one has lived at St. Helena for years and, on com- 
ing to England, wishes to be constantly reminded of 
the little island of glens and gorges and that immense 
" combe " where James Town nestles, beyond a doubt 
that strange person could not do better than create a 
garden of gullies with the indigenous geranium blaz- 
ing out of every cranny. But I cannot imagine any 
one being so anxious to perpetuate a stay among the 
picturesque loneliness of the place. I think it ex- 
tremely unlikely that if Napoleon I. had lived to re- 
turn to France, he would have assimilated any portion 
of the gardens of Versailles with those that were 
under his windows at Longwood. I could more easily 
fancy his making an honest attempt to transform the 
ridge above Geranium Valley on which Longwood 
stands — if there is anything of that queer residence 
left by the white ants — the natural owners of the 
island — into a memory of the Grand Trianon, only 
for the " maggior dolor e " that would have come to 
him had such an enterprise been successful. 

My opinion is that a garden should be such as to 
cause a visitor to exclaim, — 

" How natural! " rather than, " How queer! " 

A lake may be artificial; but it will only appear so 



172 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

if its location is artificial; and, therefore, in spite of 
the fact that there are countless mountain tarns in 
Scotland and Wales, it is safest for the lake to be 
made on the lowest part of your ground. I dare say 
that a scientific man without a conscience could, by 
an arrangement of forced draught apparatus, cause 
an artificial river to flow uphill instead of down; but 
though such a stream would be quite a pleasing inci- 
dent of one of the soirees of the Royal Society at 
Burlington House, I am certain that it would look 
more curious than natural if carried out in an Eng- 
lish garden ground. The artificial canals of the 
Dutch gardens and of those English gardens which 
were made to remind William III. of his native land, 
will look natural in proportion to their artificiality. 
This is not so hard a saying as it may seem; I mean 
to say that if the artificial canal apes a natural river, 
it will look unnatural. If it aims at being nothing 
but a Dutch canal, it will be a very interesting part 
of a garden — a Dutch garden — plan, and as such it 
will seem in the right and natural place. If a thing 
occupies a natural place — the place where you expect 
to find it — it must be criticised from the standpoint 
of its environment, so to speak, and not on the basis 
of the canons that have a general application. 

And to my mind the difference between what is 
right and what is wrong in a garden is not the differ- 
ence between what is the fashion and what is not the 
fashion; but between the appropriate and the inap- 
propriate. A rectangular canal is quite right in a 
copy of the Dutch garden; but it would be quite 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 173 

wrong within sight of the cascades of the Villa d'Este 
or any other Italian garden. Topiary work is quite 
right in a garden that is meant frankly to be a copy 
of one of the clipped shrubberies of the seventeenth 
and of the eighteenth century that preceded landscape 
treatment, but it is utterly out of place in a garden 
where flowers grow according to their own sweet will, 
as in a rosery or a herbaceous border. A large num- 
ber of people dislike what Mr. Robinson calls " Vege- 
table Sculpture," and would not allow any example 
to have a place on their property; but although I 
think I might trust myself to resist every temptation 
to admit such an element into a garden of mine, I 
should not hesitate to make a feature of it if I wanted 
to be constantly reminded of a certain period of his- 
tory. It would be as unjust to blame me on this ac- 
count as it would be to blame Mr. Hugh Thomson 
for introducing topiary into one of his exquisite illus- 
trations to Sir Roger de Cover ley. I would, I know, 
take great pleasure in sitting for hours among the pea- 
cocks and bears and cocked hats of the topiary sculp- 
tor, because I should feel myself in the company of 
Sir Roger and Will Wimble, and I consider that they 
would be very good company indeed; but I admit 
that I should prefer that that particular garden was 
on some one else's property. I should spend a very 
pleasant twenty minutes in a neighbour's — a near 
neighbour's — reproduction of the grotto at Pope's 
Villa at Twickenham, not because I should be want- 
ing in a legitimate abhorrence of the thing, but be- 
cause I should be able to repeople it with several very 



174 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

pleasant people — say, Arbuthnot, Garth, and Mr. 
Henry Labouchere. But heaven forbid that I should 
spend years of my life in the construction of a sec- 
ond Pope's grotto as one of the features of my all- 
too-constricted garden space. 

One could easily write a book on " Illustrating 
Gardens," meaning not the art of reproducing illus- 
trations of gardens, but the art of constructing 
gardens that would illustrate the lives of certain in- 
teresting people at certain interesting periods. The 
educational value of gardens formed with such an 
intent would be great, I am sure. I had occasion 
some time ago to act the part of their governess to my 
little girls, and to Dorothy's undisguised amazement 
I took the class into the garden, and not knowing how 
to begin — whether with an inquiry into the economic 
value of a thorough grounding in Conic Sections, or 
a consideration of the circumstances attending the 
death of Mary Queen of Scots — I have long believed 
that a modern coroner's jury would have found that 
the cause of death was blood poisoning, as there is no 
evidence that the fatal axe was aseptic, not having 
been boiled before using — I begged the girls to walk 
round with me. 

" This is something quite new," said Rosamund — 
" lessons in a garden." 

" Is it? " I asked. " Did Miss Pinkerton ever tell 
you about a man named Plato? " 

It was generally admitted that if she had ever done 
so they would have remembered the name. 

I saw at once that this was a chance that might not 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 175 

occur again for me to recover my position. The re- 
spect that I have for Miss Pinkerton is almost equal 
to that I have for Lempriere or Dr. William Smith. 
I unfolded like a philactery the stores of my 
knowledge on the subject of the garden of Academus, 
where Plato and his pupils were wont to meet and 
discover — 

" How charming is divine philosophy ! 
Not harsh and crabbed as some fools affirm, 
But musical as is Apollo's lute," 

and the children learned for the first time the origin 
of the name Academy. They were struck powerfully 
with the idea, which they thought an excellent one, 
of the open-air class. 

This was an honest attempt on my part to illustrate 
something through the medium of the garden; but 
Miss Pinkerton's methods differed from those of 
Plato: the blackboard was, in her opinion, the only 
medium of illustration for a properly organised class. 

It was a daily delight to me when I lived in Ken- 
sington to believe that Addison must have walked 
through my garden when he had that cottage on the 
secluded Fulham Road, far away from the distract- 
ing noise and bustle of the town, and went to pay a 
visit to his wife at Holland Park. Some of the trees 
of that garden must have been planted even before 
Addison's day. There was a mighty mulberry-tree — 
a straggler from Melbury (once Mulbery) Road — 
and this was probably one of the thousands planted 
by King James when he became possessed of that 



176 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

admirable idea of silk culture in England. Now, 
strange to say, I could picture to myself much more 
vividly the presence of Addison in that garden than 
I can the bustle of the old Castle's people within the 
walls which dominate my present ground. These 
people occupied the Castle from century to century. 
When they first entered into possession they wore the 
costume of the Conquest, and no doubt they hon- 
oured the decrees of fashion as they changed from 
year to year; but they faded away without leaving a 
record of any personality to absorb the attention of 
the centuries, and without such an individuality I 
find it impossible to realise the scene, except for an 
occasional hour when the moonlight bathes the tower 
of the ruined keep, and I fancy that I hear the iron 
tread of the warder going his rounds — I cannot 
plunge myself into the spacious days of plate armour. 
It is the one Great Man or the one Great Woman 
that enables us nowadays to realise his or her period, 
and our Castle has unhappily no ghost with a name, 
and one ghost with a name is more than an armed 
host of nonentities. There is a tradition — there is 
just a scrap of evidence to support it — that Dr. Sam- 
uel Johnson once visited a house in the High Street 
and ate cherries in the garden. Every time I have 
visited that house I have seen the lumbering Hogarth- 
ian hero intent upon his feast, and every time that I 

am in that garden I hear the sound of his " Why, 
s i r » 

I complained bitterly to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
when he was with us in the tilt-yard garden, that we 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 177 

had not even the shadow of a ghost — ghosts by the 
hundred, no doubt, but no real ghost of some one that 
did things. 

" You will have to create one for yourself," he said. 

" One must have bones and flesh and blood — plenty 
of blood, before one can create a ghost, as you well 
know," said I. " I have searched every available spot 
for a name associated with the place, but I have found 
nothing." 

" Don't be in a hurry; he'll turn up some day when 
you're not expecting him," said my friend. 

But I am still awaiting an entity connected with 
the Castle, and I swear, as did the young Lord 
Hamlet : — 

" By Heaven ! I'll make a ghost of him that lets me." 



CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH 

Our Garden of Peace is a Garden of Freedom — 
freedom of thought, freedom of converse. In it one 
may cultivate all the flora of illiteracy without re- 
buke, as well as the more delicate, but possibly less 
fragrant growths of literature, including those 
hybrids which I suppose must give great satisfaction 
to the cultivators. We assert our claim to talk about 
whatever we please ; we will not submit to be told that 
anything is out of our reach as a subject: if we can- 
not reach the things that are so defined we can at least 
make an attempt to knock them down with a bamboo. 
Eventually we may even discourse of flowers; but 
if we do we certainly will not adopt the horticultural 
standard of worth, which is " of -^- commercial 

7 some 

value." A good many things well worthy of a strict 
avoidance in conversation possess great commercial 
value, and others that we hold very close to our hearts 
are of no more intrinsic value than a Victoria Cross. 
We have done and shall do our best, however, not to 
make use of the word culture, unless it be in connec- 
tion with a disease. The lecturers on tropical diseases 
talk of their " cholera cultures " and their " yellow- 
fever cultures " and their " malaria cultures " ; but we 
know that there is a more malignant growth than any 

178 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 179 

of these : it is spelt by its cultivators with the phonetic 
" K " and it has banished the word that begins with a 
" c " from the English language, unless, as I say, in 
referring to the development of a malady. That is 
where victory may be claimed by the vanquished : the 
beautiful word is banished for ever from the English 
literature in which it once occupied an exalted place. 
It is because of the Freedom which we enjoy in 
this Garden of Peace of ours that I did not hesitate 
for a moment to quote Tennyson to Dorothy a few 
days ago, when we were chatting about Poets' Gar- 
dens, from the " garden inclosed " of the Song of 
Solomon — the most beautiful ever depicted — to that 
of Maud. It requires some courage to quote Ten- 
nyson beyond the limits of our own fireside in these 
days. The days when he was constantly quoted now 
seem as the days of Noe, before the Flood — the flood 
of the formless which we are assured is poetry nowa- 
days. It is called " The New School." Some twenty- 
five or thirty years ago something straddled across 
our way through the world labelled " New Art." Its 
lines were founded upon those of the crushed cock- 
roach, and it may have contributed to the advance of 
the temperance movement; for its tendency was cer- 
tainly to cause any inebriate who found a specimen 
watching him wickedly from the mouth of a vase of 
imitation pewter on the mantel-shelf in a drawing- 
room, or in the form of a pendant in sealing-wax 
enamel on the neck of a young woman, to pull him- 
self together and sign anything in reason in the direc- 
tion of abstaining. 



180 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

The new poetry is the illiterary equivalent of the 
old " New Art." It is flung in our faces with the 
effect of a promiscuous handful from the bargain 
counter of a draper's cheap sale — it is a whiz of odd 
lengths and queer colours, and has no form but plenty 
of flutter. Poetry may not be as a great critic said 
it was — form and form and nothing but form; but it 
certainly is not that amorphous stuff which is jerked 
into many pages just now. I have read pages of it 
in which the writers seem to have taken as a model 
of design one of the long dedications of the eighteenth 
century, or perhaps the " lettering " on the tomb- 
stone of the squire in a country church, or, most likely 
of all, the half column of " scare headings " in a Sun- 
day newspaper in one of the Western States of 
America. 

It may begin with a monosyllable, and be followed 
by an Alexandrine; then come a stuttering half- 
dozen unequal ribbon lengths, rather shop-soiled, and 
none of them riming; but suddenly we find the 
tenth line in rime with the initial monosyllable 
which you have forgotten. Then there may come 
three or four rimes and as many half-rimes — 
f-sharp instead of f — and then comes a bundle 
of prosaic lines with the mark of the scissors on 
their ragged endings; the ravellings are assumed 
to adorn the close as the fringes of long ago were 
supposed to give a high-class " finish " to the 
green rep upholstering of the drawing-room centre 
ottoman. 

And yet alongside this sort of thing we pick up 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 181 

many thin volumes of verse crowded with beauty of 
thought, of imagination, of passion. 

And then what do we find given to us every week 
in Punch and several of the illustrated papers? 
Poem after poem of the most perfect form in rhythm 
and rimes — faultless double rimes and triple and 
quadruple syllables all ringing far more true than 
any in Hudibras or the Ingoldsby Legends. Sir 
Owen Seaman's verses surpass anything in the Eng- 
lish language for originality both in phrase and 
thought, and Adrian Ross has shown himself the 
equal of Gilbert in construction. The editor of 
Pimch has been especially happy in his curry-comb- 
ing of the German ex-Kaiser; we do not forget that 
it was his poem on the same personage, which ap- 
peared in The World after the celebrated telegram 
to Kriiger, that gave him his sure footing among the 
elite of satirical humour. The 



Pots- 



Dam silly," 

was surely the most finished sting that ever came from 
the tail of what I venture to call " vespa-verse." 

I remember how, when I came upon Barham's 
rime, — 

" Because Mephistopheles 
Had thrown in her face a whole cup of hot coffee-lees," 

I thought that the limits of the " triple-bob," as I 
should like to call it, had been reached. Years after- 



182 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

wards I found myself in a fit of chuckling over 
Byron's 

" Tell us, ye husbands of wives intellectual, 
Now tell us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all? " 

After another lapse I found among the carillon of 
Calverley, — 

" No, mine own, though early forced to leave you, 
Still my heart was there where first we met ; 
In those * Lodgings with an ample sea-view,' 
Which were, forty years ago, s To Let.' " 

The Bab Ballads are full of whimsical rimes ; but put 
all these that I have named together and you will find 
that they are easily out jingled by Sir Owen Seaman. 
The first " copy of verses " in Punch any week is a 
masterpiece in its way, and assuredly some of his 
brethren of Bouverie Street are not very far behind 
him in the merry dance in which he sets the pas. 

A good many years ago — I think it was shortly 
after the capitulation of Paris — there was a cor- 
respondence in The Graphic about the English words 
for which no rime could be found. One was " silver," 
the other " month." It was, I think, Burnand who 
contrived, — 

" Argentum, we know, is the Latin for silver, 
And the Latin for spring ever was and is still, ver." 

But then purists shook their heads and said that Latin 
was not English, and the challenge was for English 
rimes. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 183 

As for " month," Mr. Swinburne did not hesitate 
to write a whole volume of exquisite poems to a child 
to bring in his rime for month: it was " millionth "; 
but the metre was so handled by the master that it 
would have been impossible for even the most casual 
reader to make the word a dissyllable. In the same 
volume he found a rime for babe in " astrolabe." 

(With regard to my spelling of the word " rime," 
I may here remark that I have done so for years. I 
was gratified to find my lead followed in the Cam- 
bridge History of English Literature.) 

And all this weedy harvest of criticism and remi- 
niscence has come through my quoting Tennyson 
without an apology ! All that I really had to say was 
that there is no maker of verses in England to-day 
who has the same mastery of metre as Tennyson had. 
It is indeed because of the delicacy of his ear for 
words that so many readers are disposed to think his 
verse artificial. But there are people who think that 
all art is artificial. (This is a very imminent subject 
for consideration in a garden, and it has been con- 
sidered by great authorities in at least two books, to 
which I may refer if I go so far as to write some- 
thing about a garden in these pages.) All that I 
will say about the art, the artifice, the artfulness, or 
the artificiality of the pictures that Tennyson brings 
before my eyes through his mastery of his medium, is 
that I have always placed a higher value upon the 
meticulous than upon the slap-dash in every form of 
art. It was said that the late Duke of Cambridge 
could detect a speck of rust on a sabre quicker than 



184 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

any Commander-in-Chief that ever lived; but I do 
not therefore hold that he was a greater soldier than 
Marlborough. But if Marlborough could make the 
brightness of his sabres do the things that he meant 
them to do, his victories were all the more brilliant. 

I dare say there are quite a number of people who 
think that Edmund Yates's doggerel about a brand 
of Champagne — it commences something like this, if 
my memory serves me: — 

" Dining with Bulteen 
Captain of Militia, 
Ne'er was dinner seen 
Soupier or fishyer " 



quite equal to the best that Calverley or Seaman ever 
wrote, because it has that slap-dash element about it 
that disregards correct rimes; but I am not among 
those critics. Tennyson does not usually paint an 
impressionist picture, though he can do so when he 
pleases; he is rather a pre-Raphaelite ; but, however 
he works, he produces his picture and it is a picture. 
Talk of Art and Nature — there never was a poet 
who reproduced Nature with an art so consummate; 
there never was a poet who used his art so graphically. 
Of course I am now talking of Tennyson at his best, 
not of Tennyson of The May Queen, which is cer- 
tainly deficient enough in art to please — as it has 
pleased — the despisers of the meticulous, but of Ten- 
nyson in his lyrical mood — of the garden-song in 
Maud, of the echo-song in The Princess — both dia- 
monds, not in the rough, but cut into countless facets 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 185 

— Tennyson in The Passing of Arthur, and countless 
pages of the Idylls, Tennyson of the pictorial sim- 
plicity of Enoch Arden and the full brush of Ulysses, 
Tithonus, Lucretius, the battle glow of The Ballad 
of the Revenge, the muted trumpet-notes of The 
Defence of Lucknow. 

And yet through all are those lowering lines which 
somehow he would insist on introducing in the wrong 
places with infinite pains! It was as if he took the 
trouble to help us up a high marble staircase to the 
cupola of a tower, and to throw open before our eyes 
a splendid landscape, only to trip us up when we are 
lost in wonder of it all, and send us headlong to the 
dead earth below. 

It was when we were looking down a gorge of 
tropical splendour in the island of Dominica in the 
West Indies opening a wide mouth to the Caribbean, 
that the incomparable lines from Enoch Arden came 
upon me in the flash of the crimson-and-blue wings 
of a bird — one of the many lories, I think it was — 
that fled about the wild masses of the brake of 
hibiscus, and I said them to Dorothy. Under our 
eyes was a tropical garden on each side of the valley 
— a riot of colour — a tropical sunset laid at our feet 
in the tints of a thousand flowers down to where the 
countless palms of the gorge began to mingle with 
the yuccas that swayed over the sea-cliffs in the blue 
distance. 



" The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 



186 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep 

Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, 

As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 

Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, 

A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail. 

No sail from day to day, but every day 

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 

Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 

The blaze upon the waters to the east; 

The blaze upon his island overhead ; 

The blaze upon the waters to the west; 

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 

The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 

There was the most perfect picture of the tropical 
island. 

Some months after we had returned to England I 
found the Enoch Arden volume tying on the floor at 
Dorothy's feet. She was roseate with indignation as 
I entered the room. I paused for an explanation. 

It came. She touched the book with her foot — it 
was a symbolic spurn — as much as any one with a 
conscience could give to a royal-blue tooled morocco 
binding. 

" How could he do it? " she cried. 

"Do what?" 

" Those two lines at the end. Listen to this " — she 
picked up the book with a sort of indignant snatch : — 

" ' There came so loud a calling of the sea 
That all the houses in the haven rang. 
He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad 
Crying with a loud voice, " A sail ! a sail ! 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 187 

I am saved," and so fell back and spoke no more. 
So past the strong, heroic soul away. 
And when they buried him the little port 
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.' 

" Now tell me if I don't do well to be angry," cried 
Dorothy. "Those two lines — "a costlier funeral"! 
He should have given the items in the bill and said 
what was the name of the undertaker. Oh, why 
didn't you warn me off that awful conclusion? What 
should you say the bill came to? Oh, Alfred, Lord 
Tennyson ! " 

I shook my head sadly, of course. 

" He does that sort of thing now and then," I 
said sadly. " You remember the young lady whose 
' light blue eyes ' were ' tender over drowning 
flies ' ? and the ' oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous 
blasphemies.' " 

" I do now, but they are not so bad as that about 
the costly funeral. Why does he do it — tell me that 
— put me wise? " 

" I suppose we must all have our bit of fun now 
and again. Kean, when in the middle of his most 
rousing piece of declamation, used to turn from his 
spellbound audience and put out his tongue at one 
of the scene-shifters. If you want to be kept con- 
stantly at the highest level you must stick to Milton." 

There was a pause before Dorothy said, — 

" I suppose so ; and yet was there ever anything 
funnier than his description of the battle in heaven? " 

"Funny? Majestic, you mean?" said I, deeply 
shocked. 



188 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" Well, majestically funny, if you wish. The idea 
of those ' ethereal virtues ' throwing big stones at one 
another, and knowing all the time that it didn't mat- 
ter whether they were hit or not — the gashes closed 
like the gashes we loved making with our spades in the 
stranded jelly-fish at low tide. But I suppose you 
will tell me that Milton must have his joke with the 
rest of them. Oh, I wonder if all poetry is not a 
fraud." 

That is how Tennyson did for himself by not know- 
ing where to stop. I expect that what really hap- 
pened was that when he had written: — 

" So past the strong, heroic soul away," 

he found that there was still room for a couple of 
lines on the page and he could not bear to see the 
space wasted. 

And it was not wasted either ; for I remember talk- 
ing to the late Dr. John Todhunter, himself a most 
accomplished poet and a scholarly critic, about the 
" costlier funeral " lines, and he defended them 
warmly. 

And the satisfying of Dr. Todhunter must be re- 
garded as counting for a good deal more in the 
balance against my poor Dorothy's disapproval. 

Lest this chapter should appear aggressively di- 
gressive in a book that may be fancied to have some- 
thing to do with gardens, I may say that while Alfred, 
Lord Tennyson had a great love for observing the 
peculiarities of flower and plant growths, he must 
have cared precious little for the garden as the solace 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 189 

of one's declining years. He did not pant for it as 
the hart pants for the water-brooks. He never came 
to think of the hours spent out of a garden as wasted. 
He did not live in his garden, nor did he live for it. 
That is what amazes us in these days, nearly as much 
as the stories of the feats of Mr. Gladstone with the 
axe of the woodcutter. Not many of us would have 
the heart to stand by while a magnificent oak or syca- 
more is being cut down. We would shrink from 
such an incident as we should from an execution. 
But forty years ago the masses were ready to worship 
the executioner. They used to be admitted in crowds 
to Hawarden to watch the heroic old gentleman in 
his shirt-sleeves and with his braces hanging down, 
butchering a venerable elm in his park, and when the 
trunk crashed to the ground they cheered vocifer- 
ously, and when he wiped the perspiration from his 
brow, they rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs 
in the drops just as men and women tried to damp 
their handkerchiefs in the drippings of the axe of the 
headsman, who, in a stroke, slew a monarch and made 
a martyr, outside the Banqueting House in White- 
hall. 

And when the excursionists were cheering the hero 
of Hawarden, Thomas Hardy was writing The 
Woodlanders. Between Hardy and Hawarden there 
was certainly a great gulf fixed. I do not think that 
any poet ever wrote an elegy so affecting as the 
chapter on the slaying of the oak outside the house 
of the old man who died of the shock. But the scent 
of the woodland clings to the whole book ; I have read 



190 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

it once a year for more than a quarter of a century. 

Tennyson never showed that he loved his garden 
as Mr. Hardy showed he loved his woodland. In the 
many beautiful lines suggesting his affection for his 
lawns and borders Tennyson makes a reader feel that 
his joy was purely Platonic — sometimes patronis- 
ingly Platonic. It is very far from approaching the 
passion of a lover for his mistress. One feels that he 
actually held that the garden was made for the poet 
not the poet for the garden, which, I need hardly 
say, we all hold to be a heresy. The union between 
the true garden-lover and the garden may be a 
mesalliance, but that is better than marriage de con- 
venance. 

But to return to the subject of Poets' Gardens, we 
agreed that the gardens of neither of the poet's 
dwelling-places were worth noticing; but they were 
miracles of design compared with that at the red brick 
villa where the white buses stopped at Putney — the 
house where the body of Algernon Charles Swin- 
burne lay carefully embalmed by his friend, Theodore 
Watts-Dunton. Highly favoured visitors were occa- 
sionally admitted to inspect the result of the process 
by which the poet had his palpitations reduced to the 
discreet beats of the Putney metronome, and visitors 
shook their heads and said it was a marvellous refor- 
mation. So it was — a triumph of the science of em- 
balming, not " with spices and savour of song," but 
with the savourless salt of True Friendship. The 
reformed poet was now presentable, but he was no 
longer a live poet: the work of reformation had 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 191 

changed the man into a mummy — a most presentable 
mummy; and it was understood that the placid exist- 
ence of a mummy is esteemed much more than the 
passionate rapture of an early morning lark, or of 
the nightingale that has a bad habit of staying out 
all night. 

It is a most unhappy thing that the first operation 
of the professional embalmer is to extract the brains 
of his subject, and this was done through the medium 
of a quill — a very suitable implement in the case of a 
writer: he has begun the process himself long before 
he is stretched on the table of the operator. Almost 
equally important it is that the subject should be 
thoroughly dried. Mr. Swinburne's true friend knew 
his business: he kept him perpetually dry and with 
his brain atrophied. 

The last time I saw the poet he was on view under 
the desiccating influence of a biscuit factory. He 
looked very miserable, and I know that I felt very 
miserable observing the triumph of the Watts-Dunton 
treatment, and remembering the day when the glory 
and glow of Songs before Sunrise enwrapt me until 
I felt that the whole world would awaken when such 
a poet set the trumpet to his lips to blow! 

Mr. Watts-Dunton played the part of Vivien to 
that merle Merlin, and all the forest echoed " Fool! " 

But it was really a wonderful reformation that he 
brought about. 

I looked into the garden at that Putney reforma- 
tory many times. It was one of the genteelest places 



192 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

I ever saw and so handy for the buses. It was called, 
by one of those flashes of inspiration not unknown 
in the suburbs, " The Pines." It might easily have 
been "The Cedars" or "The Hollies," or even 
" Laburnum Villa." 

The poet was carefully shielded by his true freind. 
Few visitors were allowed to see him. The more 
pushing were, however, met half-way. They were 
permitted as a treat to handle the knob of Mr. Swin- 
burne's walking-stick. 

Was it, I wonder, a Transatlantic visitor who 
picked up from the linoleum of the hall beside the 
veneered mahogany hat-stand, and the cast-iron um- 
brella-holder, a scrap of paper in the poet's hand- 
writing with the stanza of a projected lyric? — 

" I am of dust and of dryness ; 

I am weary of dryness and dust ! 
But for my constitutional shyness 
I'd go on a bust." 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH 

I came across an excellent piece of advice the other 
day in a commonplace volume on planning a garden. 
It was in regard to the place of statuary in a garden. 
But the writer is very timid in this matter. He writes 
as if he hoped no one would overhear him when he 
says that he has no rooted objection, although many 
people have, to a few bits of statuary; but on no plea 
would he allow them the freedom of the garden ; their 
place should be close to the house, and they should be 
admitted even to that restricted territory only with 
the greatest caution. On no account should anything 
of that sort be allowed to put a foot beyond where the 
real garden begins — the real clearly being the herba- 
ceous part, though the formal is never referred to as 
the ideal. 

He gives advice regarding the figures as does a 
" friend of the family " when consulted about the boys 
who are inclined to be wild or the girls who are a bit 
skittish. No, no; one should be very firm with 
Hermes ; from the stories that somehow get about re- 
garding him, he is certainly inclined to be fast; he 
must not be given a latch-key; and as for Artemis — 
well, it is most likely only thoughtlessness on her part, 
but she should not be allowed to hunt more than two 

193 



194 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

days a week. Still, if looked after, both Hermy and 
Arty will be all right; above all things, however, the 
list of their associates should be carefully revised: 
the fewer companions they have the better it will be 
for all concerned. 

Now, I venture to agree with all this advice gen- 
erally. Fond as I am of statuary, whether stone or 
lead, I am sure that it is safest in or about the House 
Garden; and no figure that I possess is in any other 
part of my ground ; but this is only because I do not 
possess a single Faun or Dryad or Daphne. If I 
were lucky enough to have these, I should know 
where to place them and it would not be in a place 
of formality, but just the opposite. They have no 
business with formalities, and would look as incon- 
gruous among the divinities who seem quite happy on 
pedestals as would Pan in modern evening dress, or 
a Russian danceuse in corsets, or a Polish in anything 
at all. 

If I had a Pan I would not be afraid to locate 
him in the densest part of a shrubbery, where only his 
ears and the grin between them could be seen among 
the foliage and his goat's shank among the lower 
branches. His effigy is shown in its legitimate place 
in Gabe's Picture, " Fete Galante." That is the cor- 
rect habitat of Pan, and that is where he would be 
shown in the hall of the Natural History Museum 
where every " exhibit " has its natural entourage. If 
I had a Dryad and had not a pond with reeds about 
its marge, I would make one for her accommodation, 
for, except with such surroundings she should not be 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 195 

seen in a garden. I have a Daphne, but she is an 
indoor one, being frailly made, and with a year's 
work of undercutting, in Greek marble — a precious 
copy of Bernini's masterpiece. But if I had an out- 
door Daphne, I would not rest easy unless I knew 
that she was within easy touch of her laurel. 

That is why I do not think that any hard and fast 
rule should be laid down in the matter of the dis- 
posal of statuary in a garden ground. But on the 
general principle of " the proper place," I certainly 
am of the opinion expressed by the writer to whom 
I have referred — that this element of interest and 
beauty should be found mainly in connection with 
the stonework of the house. In any part of an Italian 
garden stone figures seem properly placed; because 
so much of that form of garden is made up of sculp- 
tured stone; but in the best examples of the art you 
will find that the statuary is placed with due regard 
to the " feature " it is meant to illustrate. It is, in 
fact, part of the design and eminently decorative, as 
well as being stimulating to the memory and sugges- 
tive to the imagination. In most of the English gar- 
dens that were planned and carried out during the 
greater part of the nineteenth century, the stone and 
lead figures that formed a portion of the original 
design of the earlier days were thrown about without 
the least reference to their fitness for the places they 
were forced to occupy; and the consequence was that 
they never seemed right : they seemed to have no busi- 
ness where they were; hence the creation of a preju- 
dice against such things. Happily, however, now 



196 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

that it is taken for granted that garden design is the 
work of some one who is more of an architect than 
a horticulturist, though capability in the one direction 
is intolerable without its complement in the other, the 
garden ornamental is coming into its own again; and 
the prices which even ordinary and by no means 
unique examples fetch under the hammer show that 
they are being properly appreciated. 

It is mainly in public parks that one finds the hor- 
ticultural skill overbalanced, not by the architectural, 
but by the " Parks Committee " of the Town Coun- 
cil; consequently knowing, as every one must, the 
usual type of the Town Council Committee-man, one 
can only look for a display of ignorance, stupidity, 
and bad taste, the result of a combination of the three 
being sheer vulgarity. The Town Council usually 
have a highly competent horticulturist, and his part 
of the business is done well ; but I have known many 
cases of the professional man being overruled by a 
vulgar, conceited member of the Committee even on 
a professional point, such as the arrangement of 
colour in a bed of single dahlias. 

" My missus abominates yaller," was enough to 
veto a thoroughly artistic scheme for a portion of a 
public garden. 

I was in the studio of a distinguished portrait 
painter in London on what was called " Show Sun- 
day " — the Sunday previous to the sending of the 
pictures to the Hanging Committee of the Royal 
Academy, and there I was introduced by the artist, 
who wanted to throw the fellow at somebody's head, 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 197 

not having anything handy that he could, without dis- 
courtesy, throw at the fellow's head, to a gentleman 
representing the Committee of Selection of a move- 
ment in one of the most important towns in the Mid- 
lands, to present the outgoing Lord Mayor with a 
portrait of himself. With so aggressively blatant a 
specimen of cast-iron conceit I had never previously 
been brought in contact. At least three of the por- 
traits on the easels in the studio were superb. At 
the Academy Exhibition they attracted a great deal 
of attention and the most laudatory criticism. But 
the delegate from the Midlands shook his head at 
them and gave a derisive snuffle. 

" Not up to much," he muttered to me. " I reckon 
I'll deal in another shop. I ain't the sort as is carried 
away by the sound of a name. I may not be one of 
your crickets; but I know what I like and I know 
what I don't like, and these likenesses is them. Who's 
that old cock with the heyglass — I somehow seem to 
feel that I've seen him before? " 

I told him that the person whom he indicated was 
Lord Goschen. 

" I guessed he was something in that line — wears 
the heyglass to make people fancy he's something 
swagger. Well, so long." 

That was the last we saw of the delegate. He was 
not one of the horny-handed, I found out ; but he had 
some connection with these art-arbiters; he was the 
owner of a restaurant that catered for artisans of the 
lower grade. 

I had the curiosity to inquire of a friend living in 



198 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the town he represented so efficiently, respecting the 
commission for the portrait, and he gave me the name 
of a flashy meretricious painter whose work was 
treated with derision from Chelsea to St. John's 
Wood. But my informant added that the Committee 
of the Council were quite pleased with the portrait, 
and had drunk the health of the painter on the day of 
its presentation. 

When a distinguished writer expressed the opinion 
that there is safety in a multitude of councillors, he 
certainly did not mean Town Councillors. If he did 
he was wrong. 

When on the subject of the garden ornamental, I 
should like to venture to express my opinion that it is 
a mistake to fancy that it is not possible to furnish 
your grounds tastefully and in a way that will add 
immensely to their interest unless with conventional 
objects — in the way of sundials or bird baths or vases 
or seats. I know that the Venetian well-heads which 
look so effective, cost a great deal of money, and so 
does the wrought-iron work if it is at all good, and 
unless it is good it is not worth possessing. But if 
you have an uncontrollable ambition to possess a well- 
head, why not get the local builder to construct one 
for you, with rubble facing of bits of stone of varying 
colour, only asking a mason to make a sandstone 
coping for the rim and carve the edge? This could be 
done for three or four pounds, and if properly de- 
signed would make a most interesting and suggestive 
ornament. 

There is scarcely a stonemason's yard in any town 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 199 

that will not furnish a person of some resource with 
many bits of spoilt carving that could be used to 
advantage if the fault is not obtrusive. If you live 
in a brick villa, you may consider yourself fortunate 
in some ways; for you need not trouble about stone- 
work — brick-coloured terra-cotta ornaments will give 
a delightful sense of warmth to a garden, and these 
may be bought for very little if you go to the right 
place for them; and your builder's catalogue will 
enable you to see what an endless variety of sizes and 
shapes there is available in the form of enrichments 
for shop facades. Only a little imagination is re- 
quired to allow of your seeing how you can work in 
some of these to advantage. 

But, in my opinion, nothing looks better in a villa 
garden than a few large flower-pots of what I might 
perhaps call the natural shape. These never seem out 
of place and never in bad taste. Several that I have 
seen have a little enrichment, and if you get your 
builder to make up a low brick pedestal for each, 
using angle bricks and pier bricks, you will be out 
of pocket to the amount of a few shillings and you 
will have obtained an effect that will never pall on 
you. But you must remember that the pedestal — 
I should call it the stand — should be no more than a 
foot high. I do not advocate the employment of old 
terra-cotta drain-pipes for anything in a garden. 
Nothing can be made out of drain-pipes except a 
drain. 

There is, of course, no need for any garden to de- 
pend on ornaments for good effect; a garden is well 



200 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

furnished with its flowers, and you will find great 
pleasure in realising your ideas and your ideals if you 
devote yourself to growth and growth only; all that 
I do affirm is that your pleasure will be greatly in- 
creased if you try by all the means in your power 
to make your garden worthy of the flowers. The 
" love that beauty should go beautifully," will, I 
think, meet with its reward. 

Of course, if you have a large piece of ground and 
take my advice in making several gardens instead of 
one only, you may make a red garden of some por- 
tion by using terra-cotta freely, and I am sure that 
the effect would be pleasing. I have often thought 
of doing this; but somehow I was never in possession 
of a piece of ground that would lend itself to such a 
treatment, though I have made a free use of terra- 
cotta vases along the rose border of my house garden, 
and I found that the placing of a large well-weathered 
Italian oil- jar between the pillars of a colonnade, 
inserting a pot of coloured daisies, was very effective, 
and intensely stimulating to the pantomime erudition 
of our visitors, for never did one catch a glimpse of 
these jars without crying, "Hallo! Ali Baba." I 
promised to forfeit a sum of money equivalent to the 
price of one of the jars to a member of our family on 
the day when a friend walks round the place failing 
to mention the name of that wily Oriental. It is quite 
likely that behind my back they allude to the rose 
colonnade as " The Ali Baba place." 

Before I leave the subject of the garden orna- 
mental, I must say a word as to the use of marble. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 201 

I have seen in many of those volumes of such good 
advice as will result, if it is followed, in the creation 
of a thoroughly conventional garden, that in England 
the use of marble out-of-doors cannot be tolerated. 
It may pass muster in Italy, where there are quarries 
of various marbles, but it is quite unsuited to the 
English climate. The material is condemned as cold, 
and that is the last thing we want to achieve in these 
latitudes, and it is also " out of place " — so one book 
assures me, but without explaining on what grounds 
it is so, an omission which turns the assertion into a 
begging of the question. 

But I am really at a loss to know why marble 
should be thought out of place in England. As a 
matter of fact, it is not so considered, for in most 
cemeteries five out of every six tombstones are of 
marble, and all the more important pieces of statuary 
— the life-size angels — I do not know exactly what is 
the life-size of an angel, or whether the angel has been 
standardised, so I am compelled to assume the human 
dimensions — and the groups of cherubs' heads sup- 
ported on pigeon's wings are almost invariably carved 
in marble. These are the objects which are sup- 
posed to endure for centuries (the worst of it is that 
they do), so that the material cannot be condemned 
on account of its being liable to disintegrate under 
English climatic conditions: the mortality of marble 
cannot cease the moment it is brought into a grave- 
yard. 

The fact of its being mainly white accounts for the 
complaint that it conveys the impression of coldness; 



202 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

but it seems to me that this is just the impression 
which people look to acquire in some part of a gar- 
den. How many times has one not heard the excla- 
mation from persons passing out of the sunshine into 
the grateful shade, — 

"How delightfully cool!" 

The finest chimney-pieces in the world are of 
white marble, and a chimney-piece should certainly 
not suggest cold. 

That polished marble loses its gloss when it has 
been for some time in the open air is undeniable. But 
I wonder if it is not improved by the process, consid- 
ering that in such a condition it assumes a delicate 
gray hue in the course of its " weathering " and a 
texture of its own of a much finer quality than 
can be found in ordinary Portland, Bath, or Caen 
stones. 

I really see no reason why we should be told that 
marble — white marble — is unsuited to an English 
garden. In Italy we know how beautiful is its ap- 
pearance, and I do not think that any one should be 
sarcastic in referring to the facades of some of the 
mansions in Fifth Avenue, New York City. At least 
three of these represent the best that can be bought 
combined with the best that can be thought. They do 
not look aggressively ostentatious, any more than 
does Milan Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, or 
Lyons' restaurants. Marble enters largely into the 
" frontages " of Fifth Avenue as well as those of 
other abodes of the wealthy in some of the cities of 
the United States; but we are warned off its use in 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 203 

the open air in England by writers who are not timid 
in formulating canons of what they call " good taste." 
In the facade of the Cathedral at Pisa, there is a 
black column among the gray ones which are so 
effectively introduced in the Romanesque " blind 
arcading." I am sorry that I forget what is the tech- 
nical name for this treatment; but I have always 
thought, when feasting upon the architectural mas- 
terpiece, that the master-builder called each of these 
little columns by the name of one of his supporters, 
but that there was one member of the Consistory who 
was always nagging him, and he determined to set a 
black mark opposite his name; and did so very effec- 
tively by introducing the dark column, taking good 
care to let all his friends know the why and wherefore 
for his freak. I can see very plainly the grins of the 
townsfolk of the period when they saw what had been 
done, and hear the whispers of " Signor Antonio della 
colonna nigra," when the grumbler walked by. The 
master-builders of those times were merry fellows, 
and some of them carried their jests — a few of them 
of doubtful humour — into the interior of a sacred 
building, as we may see when we inspect the carving 
of the underneath woodwork of many a miserere. 

I should like to set down in black and white my 
protest against the calumniator of marble for garden 
ornaments in England, when we have so splendid an 
example of its employment in the Queen Victoria 
Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace — the noblest 
work of this character in England. 

I should like also to write something scathing about 



204 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the superior person who sneers at what I have heard 
called " Gin Palace Art." This person is ready to 
condemn unreservedly the association of art with the 
public-house, the hotel, and even the tea-room. Now, 
considering the recent slump in real palaces — the 
bishops have begun calling their palaces houses — I 
think that some gratitude should be shown to those 
licensed persons who so amply recognise the fact that 
upon them devolves the responsibiltiy of carrying on 
the tradition of the Palace. Long ago, in the days 
when there were real Emperors and Kings and 
Popes, it was an understood thing that a Royal Resi- 
dence should be a depository of all the arts, and in 
every country except England, this assumption was 
nobly .cted upon. If it had not been for the mag- 
nificent patronage — that is the right word, for it 
means protection — of many arts by the Church and 
by the State of many countries, we should know very 
little about the arts to-day. But when the men of 
many licences had the name " gin-palace " given to 
their edifices — it was given to them in the same spirit 
of obloquy as animated the scoffers of Antioch when 
they invented the name " Christian " — they nobly 
resolved to act as the Christians did, by trying to 
live up to their new name. We see how far success 
has crowned their resolution. The representative 
hostelries of these days go beyond the traditional 
king's house which was all glorious within — they are 
all glorious — so far as is consistent with educated 
taste — as to their exterior as well. A " tied house " 
really means nowadays one that is tied down to the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 205 

resolution that the best traditions of the palace shall 
be maintained. 

Let any one who can remember what the hotels and 
public-houses and eating-houses of forty years ago 
were like, say if the change that has been brought 
about is not an improvement that may be considered 
almost miraculous. In the old days when a man left 
the zinc counters of one of these places of refresh- 
ment, he was usually in a condition that was alluded 
to euphemistically as " elevated " ; but nowadays the 
man who pays a visit to a properly equipped tavern 
is elevated in no euphemistic sense. I remember the 
cockroaches of the old Albion — they were so tame 
that they would eat out of your hand. But if they 
did, the habitues of that tavern had their revenge: 
some of these expert gastronomes professed to be able 
to tell from the flavour of the soup whether it had 
been seasoned with the cockroaches of the table or 
the black beetles of the kitchen. 

"What do you mean, sir?" cried an indignant 
diner to the waiter — " I ordered portions for three, 
and yet there are only two cockroaches." 

I recollect in the old days of The Cock tavern in 
Fleet Street it was said when the report was cir- 
culated that it was enlarging its borders, that the 
name on the sign should be appropriately enlarged 
from the Cock to the Cockroach. 

I heard an explanation given of the toleration 
shown by some of the frequenters of these places to 
the cockroach and the blackbeetle. 

" They're afraid to complain," said my informant, 



206 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" lest it should be thought that they were seeing them 
again/' 

I shall never forget the awful dewey stare of a man 
who was facing a tumbler (his third) of hot punch 
in the Cheshire Cheese, at a mouse which made its ap- 
pearance only a yard or two from where we were 
sitting shortly before closing time one night. He 
wiped his forehead and still stared. The aspect of 
relief that he showed when I made a remark about 
the tameness of the mouse, quite rewarded me for 
my interposition between old acquaintances. 

Having mentioned the Cheshire Cheese in connec- 
tion with the transition period from zinc to marble — 
marble is really my theme — I cannot resist the 
temptation to refer to the well-preserved tradition 
of Dr. Johnson's association with this place. Visi- 
tors were shown the place where Dr. Johnson was 
wont to sit night after night with his friends — nay, 
the very chair that he so fully occupied was on view; 
and among the most cherished memories of seeing 
" Old London " which people from America acquired, 
was that of being brought into such close touch with 
the eighteenth century by taking lunch in this famous 
place. 

" There it was just as it had been in good old Sam- 
uel's day," said a man who knew all about it. " Noth- 
ing in the dear old tavern had been changed since his 
day — nothing whatever — not even the sand or the 
sawdust or the smells." 

But it so happens that in the hundreds of volumes 
of contemporary Johnsoniana, not excepting Bos- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 207 

well's biography, there is no mention of the name of 
the Cheshire Cheese. There is not a shred of evidence 
to support the belief that Johnson was ever within 
its doors. The furthest that conjecture can reasona- 
bly go in this connection is that one has no right to 
assume that from the list of the taverns frequented 
by Johnson the name of the Cheshire Cheese should 
be excluded. 

The fate of the Cheshire Cheese, however, proves 
that while tradition as an asset may be of great value 
to such a place, yet it has its limits. Just as soap 
and the " spellin' school " have done away with the 
romance of the noble Red Man, so against the in- 
fluence of the marble of modernity, even the full fla- 
voured aura of Dr. Johnson was unable to hold its 
own. 

Thus I am brought back — not too late, I hope — to 
my original theme, which I think took the form of 
a protest against the protestations of those writers 
who believe that marble should not find its way into 
the ornamentation of an English garden. I have had 
seats and tables and vases and columns of various 
marbles in my House Garden — I have even had a 
fountain basin and carved panels of flowers and birds 
of the same material — but although some of them 
show signs of being affected by the climate, yet noth- 
ing has suffered in this way — on the contrary, I find 
that Sicilian and " dove " marbles have improved by 
" weathering." 

I have a large round table, the top of which is in- 
laid with a variety of coloured marbles, and as I allow 



208 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

this to remain out-of-doors during seven months of 
the year, I know what sorts best withstand the rigours 
of an English South Coast June; and I am inclined 
to believe that the ordinary " dove " shows the least 
sign of hardship at the end of the season. Of course, 
the top has lost all its polish, but the cost of repol- 
ishing such a table is not more than ten shillings — I 
had another one done some years ago, and that is the 
sum I was charged for the work by a well-known firm 
on the Fulham Road; so that if I should get tired of 
seeing it weather-beaten, I can get it restored without 
impoverishing the household. 

And the mention of this leads me on to another 
point which should not be lost sight of in considering 
any scheme of garden decoration. 

My Garden of Peace has never been one of " peace 
at any price." I have happily been compelled to give 
the most inflexible attention to the price of everything. 
I like those books on garden design which tell you how 
easily you can get leaden figures and magnificent 
chased vases of bronze if you wish, but perhaps you 
would prefer carved stone. You have only to go to 
a well-known importer with a cheque-book and a con- 
sciousness of a workable bank balance, and the thing 
is done. So you will find in the pre-war cookery books 
the recipe beginning: " Take two dozen new-laid eggs, 
a quart of cream, and a pint of old brandy," etc. 
These bits of advice make very good reading, and 
doubtless may be read with composure by some peo- 
ple, but I am not among their number. 

That table, with the twelve panels and a heavy 




ENTRANCE TO THE ITALIAN GARDEN 



[Page 208 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 209 

pedestal set on castors, cost me exactly half a crown 
at an auction. When new it was probably bought for 
twelve or fourteen pounds: it is by no means a piece 
of work of the highest class; for a first-class inlaid 
table one would have to pay something like forty or 
fifty pounds: I have seen one fetch £150 at an auc- 
tion. But my specimen happened to be the Lot 1 in 
the catalogue, and people had not begun to warm to 
their bidding, — marble, as I have already said, is re- 
garded as cold. Another accident that told against its 
chances of inspiring a buyer was the fact that the ped- 
estal wanted a screw, without which the top would not 
lie in its place, and this made people think it imper- 
fect and incapable of being put right except at great 
expense. The chief reason for its not getting beyond 
the initial bid was, however, that no one wanted it. 
The mothers, particularly those of " the better class," 
in Yardley, are lacking in imagination. If they want 
a deal table for a kitchen, they will pay fifteen shill- 
ings for one, and ten shillings for a slab of marble 
to make their pastry on ; but they would not give half 
a crown for a marble table which would serve for 
kitchen purposes a great deal better than a wooden 
one, and make a baking slab — it usually gets broken 
within a month — unnecessary. 

Why I make so free a use of marble and advise 
others to do so, is not merely because I admire it in 
every form and colour, but because it can be bought 
so very cheaply upon occasions — infinitely more so 
than Portland or Bath stone. These two rarely come 
into the second-hand market, and in the mason's yard 



210 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

a slab is worth so much a square foot or a cubic foot. 
But people are now constantly turning out their 
shapeless marble mantelpieces and getting wooden 
ones instead, and the only person who will buy the 
former is the general dealer, and the most that he 
will give for one that cost <£10 or <£12 fifty years ago 
is 10s. or 12s. I have bought from dealers or build- 
ers possibly two dozen of these, never paying more 
than 10s. each for the best — actually for the one which 
I know was beyond question the best, I paid 6s., the 
price at which it was offered to me. An exceptionally 
fine one of statuary marble with fluted columns and 
beautifully carved Corinthian capitals and panels cost 
me 10s. This mantelpiece was discarded through one 
of those funny blunders which enable one to get a 
bargain. The owner of the house fancied that it was 
a production of 1860, when it really was a hundred 
years earlier. There are marble mantelpieces and 
marble mantelpieces. Some fetch 10s. and others 
£175. I knew a dealer who bought a large house 
solely to acquire the five Bossi mantelpieces which it 
contained. Occasionally one may pick up an eigh- 
teenth century crystal chandelier which has been dis- 
carded on the supposition that it was one of those 
shapeless and tasteless gasaliers which delighted our 
grandmothers in the days of rep and Berlin wool. 

But from these confessions I hope no one will be 
so ungenerous as to fancy that my predilection for 
marble is to be accounted for only because of the 
chances of buying it cheaply. While I admit that 
I prefer buying a beautiful thing for a tenth of its 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 211 

value, I would certainly refuse to have anything to 
do with an ugly thing if it were offered to me for 
nothing. But the beauty of marble is unassailable. 
It has been recognised in every quarter of the world 
for thousands of years. The only question upon 
which opinion is divided is in regard to its suitability 
to the English climate. In this connection I beg 
leave to record my experience. I take it for granted 
that when I allude to marble, it will not be supposed 
that I include that soft gypsum — sulphate of lime — 
which masquerades under the name of alabaster, and 
is carved with the tools of a woodcarver, supplemented 
by a drill and a file, in many forms by Italian crafts- 
men. This material will last in the open air very little 
longer than the plaster of Paris, by which its numer- 
ous component parts are held together. It is worth 
nothing. True alabaster is quite a different substance. 
It is carbonate of lime and disintegrates very slowly. 
The tomb of Machiavelli in the Santa Croce in Flor- 
ence is of the true alabaster, as are all the fifteenth 
and sixteenth century sarcophagi in the same quarter 
of the church; but none can be said to have suffered 
materially. It was widely used in memorial tablets 
three hundred or four hundred years ago. Shakes- 
peare makes Othello refer to the sleeping Desde- 
, mona, — 

" That whiter skin of hers than snow, 
And smooth as monumental alabaster." 

We know that it was the musical word " alabaster " 
that found favour with Shakespeare, just as it was, 



212 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

according to Miss Ethel Smyth, Mus. Doc, the musi- 
cal word " Tipperary," that helped to make a song 
containing that word a favourite with Shakespeare's 
countrymen, who have never been found lacking in 
appreciation of a musical word or a rag-time inanity. 



CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH 

Again may I beg leave to express the opinion that 
there is no need for any one to depend upon con- 
ventional ornaments with a view to make the garden 
interesting as well as ornamental. With a little imagi- 
nation, one can introduce quite a number of details 
that are absolutely unique. There is nothing that 
looks better than an arch made out of an old stone 
doorway. It may be surmounted by a properly sup- 
ported shield carved with a crest or a monogram. A 
rose pillar of stone has a charming appearance at the 
end of a vista. The most effective I have seen were 
made of artificial stone, and they cost very little. 
Many of the finest garden figures of the eighteenth 
century were made of this kind of cement, only in- 
ferior in many respects to the modern " artificial 
stone." It is unnecessary to say that any material 
that resists frost will survive that comparatively soft 
stone work which goes from bad to worse year by year 
in the open. 

But I do not think that, while great freedom and 
independence should be shown in the introduction of 
ornamental work, one should ever go so far as to con- 
struct in cold blood a ruin of any sort, nor is there any 
need, I think, to try to make a new piece look antique. 

213 



214 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

But I have actually known of a figure being deprived 
of one of its arms in order to increase its resemblance 
to the Venus of the island of Milos! Such mutilation 
is unwarrantable. I have known of Doctors of Medi- 
cine taking pains to make their heads bald, in com- 
pliance with the decrepit notion that knowledge was 
inseparable from a venerable age. There may be an 
excuse for such a proceeding, though to my mind 
this posturing lacks only two letters to be impostur- 
ing; but no excuse can be found for breaking the 
corner off a piece of moulding or for treating a stone 
figure with chemicals in order to suggest antiquity. 
Such dealers as possess a clientele worth maintaining, 
know that a thing " in mint condition," as they de- 
scribe it, is worth more than a similar thing that is 
deficient in any way. That old story about the arti- 
ficial worm-eating will not be credited by any one 
who is aware of the fact that a piece of woodwork 
showing signs of the ravages of the wood moth is 
practically worthless. There would be some sense in 
a story of a man coming to a dealer with a composi- 
tion to prevent worm-holes, as they are called, being 
recognised. Ten thousand pounds would not be too 
much to pay for a discovery that would prevent wood- 
work from being devoured by this abominable thing. 
Surely some of the Pasteur professors should be equal 
to the task of producing a serum by which living 
timber might be inoculated so as to make it immune 
to such attacks, or liable only to the disease in a mild 
form. 

But there are dealers in antiques whose dealings 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 215 

are as doubtful as their Pentateuch (according to 
Bishop Colenso's researches). Heywood tells me that 
he came across such an one in a popular seaside town 
which became a modern Hebrew City of Refuge, 
mentioned in one of the Mosaic books, during the air- 
raids. This person had for sale a Highland claidh- 
eamh-mor — that is, I can assure you, the proper way 
to spell claymore — which he affirmed had once be- 
longed to the Young Pretender. There it was, with 
his initials " Y. P.," damascened upon the blade, to 
show that there could be no doubt about it. 

And Friswell remembered hearing of another en- 
terprising trader in antiquities who had bought from 
a poor old captain of an American whaler a sailor's 
jack-knife — Thackeray called the weapon a snicker- 
snee — which bore on the handle in plain letters the 
name " Jonah," very creditably carved. Everybody 
knows that whales live to a very great age ; and it has 
never been suggested that there was at any time a 
clearing-house for whales. 

I repeat that there is no need for garden ornaments 
to be ancient; but if one must have such things, one 
should have no difficulty in finding them, even with- 
out spending enormous sums to acquire them. But 
say that one has set one's heart upon having a stone 
bench, which always furnishes a garden, no matter 
what its character may be. Well, I have bought a 
big stone slab — it had once been a step — for five shill- 
ings. I kept it until I chanced to see a damaged Port- 
land truss that had supported a heavy joist in some 
building. This I had sawn into two — there was a 



216 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

well-cut scroll on each side — and by placing these 
bits in position and laying my slab upon them, I con- 
cocted a very imposing garden bench for thirteen 
shillings. If I had bought the same already made up 
in the ordinary course of business, it would have cost 
me at least £5. If I had seen the thing in a mason's 
yard, I would have bought it at this price. 

Again, I came upon an old capital of a pillar that 
had once been in an Early Norman church — it was in 
the backyard of a man from whom I was buying 
bulbs. I told the man that I would like it, and he said 
he thought half a crown was about its value. I did 
not try to beat him down — one never gets a bargain 
by beating a tradesman down — and I set to work 
rummaging through his premises. In ten minutes I 
had discovered a second capital; and the good fellow 
said I might have this one as I had found it. I 
thought it better, however, to make the transaction 
a business one, so I paid my second half-crown for it. 
But two years had passed before I found two stone 
shafts with an aged look, and on these I placed my 
Norman relics. They look very well in the embrace 
of a Hiawatha rose against a background of old wall. 
These are but a few of the " made-ups " which fur- 
nish my House Garden, not one of which I acquired 
in what some people would term the legitimate way. 

I have a large carved seat of Sicilian marble, an- 
other of " dove " marble, and three others of carved 
stone, and no one of them was acquired by me in a 
complete state. Why should not a man or woman 
who has some training in art and who has seen the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 217 

best architectural things in the world be able to de- 
sign something that will be equal to the best in a 
stonemason's yard, I should like to know? 

And then, what about the pleasure of working out 
such details — the pleasure and the profit of it? Surely 
they count for something in this life of ours. 

Before I forsake the fascinating topic of stone- 
work, I should like to make a suggestion which I trust 
will commend itself to some of my readers. It is 
that of hanging appropriate texts on the walls of a 
garden. I have not attempted anything like this my- 
self, but I shall certainly do it some day. Garden 
texts exist in abundance, and to have one carved upon 
a simple block of stone and inserted in a wall would, 
I think, add greatly to the interest of the garden. I 
have seen a couple of such inscriptions in a garden 
near Florence, and I fancy that in the Lake District 
of England the custom found favour, or Wordsworth 
would not have written so many as he did for his 
friends. The " lettering " — the technical name for 
inscriptions — would run into money if a poet paid by 
piece-work were employed; unless he were as consid- 
erate as the one who did some beautiful tombstone 
poems and thought that, — 

" Beneath this stone repose the bones, together with the 
corp, 
Of one who ere Death cut him down was Thomas Andrew 
Thorpe," 

was good; and so it was; but as the widow was not 
disposed to spend so much as the " lettering " would 
cost, he reduced his verse to: — 



218 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" Beneath this stone there lies the corp 
Of Mr. Thomas Andrew Thorpe." 

Still the widow shook her head and begged him to 
give the question of a further curtailment his con- 
sideration. He did so, and produced, — 

" Here lies the corp 
Of T. A. Thorpe." 

This was a move in the right direction, the heart- 
broken relict thought; still if the sentiment was so 
compressible, it might be further reduced. Flowery 
language was all very well, but was it worth the extra 
money? The result of her appeal was, — 

" Thorpe's 
Corpse." 

I found some perfect garden texts in every volume 
I glanced through, from Marlowe to Masefield. 

Yes, I shall certainly revive on some of my walls, 
between the tufts of snapdragon, a delightful prac- 
tice, feeling assured that the crop will flower in many 
directions. The search for the neatest lines will of 
itself be stimulating. 

But among the suitable objects for the embellish- 
ment of any form of garden, I should not recommend 
any form of dog. We have not completed our repair- 
ing of one of our borders since a visit was paid to us 
quite unexpectedly by a young foxhound that was 
being " walked " by a dealer in horses, who has stables 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 219 

a little distance beyond the Castle. Our third little 
girl, Francie by name, has an overwhelming sympathy 
for animals in captivity, especially dogs, and the fact 
that I do not keep any since I had an unhappy ex- 
perience with a mastiff several years ago, is not a 
barrier to her friendship with " Mongrel, puppy, 
whelp, or hound, and curs of low degree " that are 
freely cursed by motorists in the High Street; for in 
Yardley dogs have trained themselves to sleep in the 
middle of the road on warm summer days. Almost 
every afternoon Francie returns from her walks 
abroad in the company of two or three of her bor- 
rowed dogs; and if she is at all past her time in set- 
ting out from home, one of them comes up to make 
inquiries as to the cause of the delay. 

Some months ago the foxhound, Daffodil, who gal- 
lantly prefers being walked by a little girl, even 
though she carries no whip, rather than by a horsey 
man who is never without a serviceable crop with a 
lash, personally conducted a party of three to find 
out if anything serious had happened to Francie ; and 
in order to show off before the others, he took advan- 
tage of the garden gate having been left open to enter 
and relieve his anxiety. He seemed to have done a 
good deal of looking round before he was satisfied 
that there was no immediate cause for alarm, and in 
the course of his stroll he transformed the border, 
adapting it to an impromptu design of his own — not 
without merit, if his aim was a reproduction of a 
prairie. 

After an industrious five minutes he received some 



220 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

token of the gardener's disapproval, and we hope 
that in a few months the end of our work of restora- 
tion will be well in sight. 

But Nemesis was nearer at hand than that horti- 
cultural hound dreamt of. Yesterday Francie ap- 
peared in tears after her walk; and this is the story 
of illoe lachrymce: It appears that the days of Daf- 
fodil's " walking " were over, and he was given an 
honourable place in the hunt kennels. The master 
and a huntsman now and again take the full pack 
from their home to the Downs for an outing and 
bring them through the town on their way back. Yes- 
terday such a route-march took place and the hounds 
went streaming in open order down the street. No 
contretemps seemed likely to mar the success of the 
outing; but unhappily Daffodil had not learned to 
the last page the discipline of the kennels, and when 
at the wrong moment Francie came out of the con- 
fectioner's shop, she was spied by her old friend, and 
he made a rush in front of the huntsman's horse to 
the little girl, nearly knocking her down in the ex- 
uberance of his greeting of her. 

Alas! there was "greeting" in the Scotch mean- 
ing of the word, when Daffodil ignored the command 
of the huntsman and had only eaten five of the choco- 
lates and an inch or two of the paper bag, when the 
hailstorm fell on him. . . . 

" But once he looked back before he reached the 
pack," said Francie between her sobs — " he looked 
back at me — you see he had not time to say ' good- 
bye,' that horrid huntsman was so quick with his lash, 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 221 

and I knew that that was why poor Daffy looked back 
— to say ' good-bye ' — just his old look. Oh, I'll save 
up my birthday money next week and buy him. Poor 
Daff ! Of course he knew me, and I knew him — I saw 
him through Miss Richardson's window above the 
doughnut tray — I knew him among all the others in 
the pack." 

Dorothy comforted her, and she became sufficiently 
herself again to be able to eat the remainder of the 
half-pound of chocolates, forgetting, in the excitement 
of the moment, to retain their share for her sisters. 

When they found this out, their expressions of sym- 
pathy for the cruel fate that fell upon Daffodil were 
turned in another direction. 

They did not make any allowance for the momen- 
tary thoughtlessness due to an emotional nature. 

The question of the purchase of the young hound 
has not yet been referred to me; but without ventur- 
ing too far in prejudging the matter, I think I may 
say that that transaction will not be consummated. 
The first of whatever inscriptions I may some day 
put upon my garden wall will be one in Greek : — 



k$iD Se 



€ Ol KUVtS. 



CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH 

Dorothy and I were having a chat about some de- 
signs in Treillage when Friswell sauntered into the 
garden, bringing with him a fine book on the Influence 
of Cimabue on the later work of Andrea del Castagno. 
He had promised to lend it to me, when in a moment 
of abstraction I had professed an interest in the 
subject. 

Dorothy showed him her sketches of the new 
scheme, explaining that it was to act as a screen for 
fig-tree corner, where the material for a bonfire had 
been collecting for some time in view of the Peace 
that we saw in our visions of a new heaven and a new 
earth long promised to the sons of men. 

Friswell was good enough to approve of the de- 
signs. He said he thought that Treillage would come 
into its own again before long. He always liked it, 
because somehow it made him think of the Bible. 

I did not like that. I shun topics that induce 
thoughts of the Bible in Friswell's brain. He is at 
his worst when thinking and expressing his thoughts 
on the Bible, and the worst of his worst is that it is 
just then he makes himself interesting. 

But how on earth Treillage and the Bible should 
become connected in any man's mind would pass the 

222 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 223 

wit of man to explain. But when the appearance of 
my Temple compelled Friswell to think of Oxford 
Street, London, W., when his errant memory was 
carrying him on to the Princess's Theatre, on whose 
stage a cardboard thing was built — about as like my 
Temple as the late Temple of the Archdiocese of Can- 
terbury was like the late Dr. Parker of the City 
Temple. 

" I don't recollect any direct or mystical reference 
to Treillage in the Book," said I, with a leaning to- 
ward sarcasm in my tone of voice. " Perhaps you 
saw something of the kind on or near the premises 
of the Bible Society." 

" It couldn't be something in a theatre again," sug- 
gested Dorothy. 

" I believe it was on a garden wall in Damascus, 
but I'm not quite sure," said he thoughtfully. " Da- 
mascus is a garden city in itself. Thank Heaven 
it is safe for some centuries more. That ex- All High- 
est who had designs on it would fain have made it 
Potsdamascus." 

" He would have done his devil best, pulling down 
the Treillage you saw there, because it was too French. 
Don't you think, Friswell, that you should try to 
achieve some sort of Treillage for your memory ? You 
are constantly sending out shoots that come to noth- 
ing for want of something firm to cling to." 

" Not a bad notion, by any means," said he. " But 
it has been tried by scores of experts on the science 
of — I forget the name of the science: I only know 
that its first two letters are ran." 



224 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" Mnemonics," said Dorothy kindly. 

" What a memory you have! " cried Friswell. " A 
memory for the word that means memory. I think 
most of the artificial memories or helps to memory are 
ridiculous. They tell you that if you wish to remem- 
ber one thing you must be prepared to recollect half 
a dozen other things — you are to be led to your des- 
tination by a range of sign-posts." 

" I shouldn't object to the sign-posts providing that 
the destination was worth arriving at," said I. " But 
if it's only the front row of the dress circle at the 
Princess's Theatre, Oxford Street, London, West — " 

" Or Damascus, Middle East," he put in, when I 
paused to breathe. " Yes, I agree with you; but after 
all, it wasn't Damascus, but only the General's house 
at Gibraltar." 

" Have mercy on our frail systems, Friswell," I 
cried. "'We are but men, are we!' as Swinburne 
lilts. Think of our poor heads. Another such abrupt 
memory-post and we are undone. How is't with you, 
my Dorothy? " 

" I seek a guiding hand," said she. " Come, Mr. 
Friswell; tell us how a General at Gib, suggested 
the Bible to you." 

" It doesn't seem obvious, does it? " said he. " But 
it so happened that the noblest traditions of the Corps 
of Sappers was maintained by the General at Gib, in 
my day. He was mad, married, and a Methodist. 
He had been an intimate friend and comrade of Gor- 
don, and he invited subscriptions from all the garrison 
for the Palestine Exploration Fund. He gave 




A GLIMPSE OF THE ITALIAN GARDEN 



[Page 224 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 225 

monthly lectures on the Tabernacle in the Wilder- 
ness, and at every recurring Feast of Tabernacles he 
had the elaborate trellis that compassed about his 
house, hung with branches of Mosaic trees. That's 
the connection — as easily obvious as the origin of 
sin." 

" Just about the same," said I. " Your chain of 
sign-posts is complete: Treillage — General — Gibral- 
tar — Gordon — Gospel. That is how you are irresis- 
tibly drawn to think of the Bible when you see a clem- 
atis climbing up a trellis." 

" My dear," said Dorothy, " you know that I don't 
approve of any attempt at jesting on the subject of 
the Bible." 

" I wasn't jesting — only alliterative," said I. 
" Surely alliteration is not jocular." 

" It's on the border," she replied with a nod. 

" The Bible is all right if you are only content not 
to take it too seriously, my dear lady," said Friswell. 
" It does not discourage simple humour — on the con- 
trary, it contains many examples of the Oriental idea 
of fun." 

" Oh, Mr. Friswell! You will be saying next that 
it is full of puns," said Dorothy. 

" I know of one, and it served as the foundation 
of the Christian Church," said he. 

" My dear Friswell, are you not going too far? " 

" Not a step. The choosing of Peter is the founda- 
tion of your Church, and the authority assumed by 
its priests. Simon Barjonah, nicknamed Peter, is one 
of the most convincingly real characters to be found 



226 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

in any book, sacred or profane. How any one can 
read his record and doubt the inspiration of the Gos- 
pels is beyond me. I have been studying Simon Bar- 
jonah for many years — a conceited braggart and a 
coward — a blasphemer — maudlin! After he had been 
cursing and swearing in his denial of his Master, he 
went out and wept bitterly. Yes, but he wasn't man 
enough to stand by the Son of God — he was not even 
man enough to go to the nearest tree and hang him- 
self. Judas Iscariot was a nobler character than 
Simon Barjonah, nicknamed Peter." 

" And what does all this mean, Mr. Friswell? " 
" It means that it is fortunate that Truth is not 
dependent upon the truth of its exponents or affected 
by their falseness," said he, and so took his departure. 
We went on with our consideration of our Treil- 
lage — after a considerable silence. But when a silence 
comes between Dorothy and me it does not take the 
form of an impenetrable wall, nor yet that of a yew 
hedge with gaps in it; but rather that of a grateful 
screen of sweet-scented honeysuckle. It is the silence 
within a bower of white clematis — the silence of 
" heaven's ebon vault studded with stars unutterably 
bright " — the silence of the stars which is an unheard 
melody to such as have ears to hear. 

" Yes," said I at last, " I am sure that you are 
right: an oval centre from which the laths radiate — 
that shall be our new trellis." 
And so it was. 

Our life in the Garden of Peace is, you will per- 
ceive, something of what the catalogues term " of 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 227 

rampant growth." It is as digressive as a wild con- 
volvulus. I perceive this now that I have taken to 
writing about it. It is not literary, but discursive. It 
throws out, it may be, the slenderest of tendrils in one 
direction ; but this " between the bud and blossom," 
sometimes flies off in another, and the effect of the 
whole is pleasantly unforeseen. 

It is about time that we had a firm trellis for the 
truant tendrils. 

And so I will discourse upon Treillage as a feature 
of the garden. 

Its effect seems to have been lost sight of for a long 
time, but happily within recent years its value as an 
auxiliary to decoration is being recognised. I have 
seen lovely bits in France as well as in Italy. It is one 
of the oldest imitations of Nature to be found in con- 
nection with garden-making, and to me it represents 
exactly what place art should take in that modifica- 
tion of Nature which we call a garden. We want 
everything that grows to be seen to the greatest ad- 
vantage. Nature grows rampant climbers, and if we 
allowed them to continue rampageous, we should have 
a jungle instead of a garden; so we agree to give her 
a helping hand by offering her aspiring children some- 
thing pleasant to cling to from the first hour of their 
sending forth grasping fingers in search of the right 
ladder for their ascent. A trellis is like a family liv- 
ing: it provides a decorative career for at least one 
member of the family. 

The usual trellis-work, as it is familiarly called, 
has the merit of being cheap — just now it is more 



228 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

than twice the price that it was five years ago; but 
still it does not run into a great deal of money unless 
it is used riotously, and this, let me say, is the very 
worst way in which it could be adapted to its pur- 
pose. To fix it all along the face of a wall of perhaps 
forty feet in length is to force it to do more than it 
should be asked to do. The wall is capable of sup- 
porting a climbing plant without artificial aid. But 
if the wall is unsightly, it were best hidden, and the 
eye can bear a considerable length of simple trellis 
without becoming weary. In this connection, how- 
ever, my experience forces me to believe that one 
should shun the " extending " form of lattice-shaped 
work, but choose the square-mesh pattern. 

This, however, is only Treillage in its elementary 
form. If one wishes to have a truly effective screen 
offering a number of exquisite outlines for the entwin- 
ing of some of the loveliest things that grow, one must 
go further in one's choice than the simple diagonals 
and rectagonals— the simple verticals and horizontals. 
The moment that curves are introduced one gets into 
a new field of charm, and I know of no means of gain- 
ing better effects than by elaborating this form of 
joinery as the French did two centuries ago, before 
the discovery was made that every form of art in a 
garden is inartistic. But possibly if the French treil- 
lageurs— for the art had many prof essors— had been a 
little more modest in their claims the landscapests 
would not have succeeded in their rebellion. But the 
treillageurs protested against such beautiful designs 
as they turned out being obscured by plants clamber- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE . 229 

ing over them, and they offered in exchange repousse 
metal foliage, affirming that this was incomparably- 
superior to a natural growth. Ordinary people re- 
fused to admit so ridiculous a claim, and a cloud came 
over the prospects of these artists. Recently, however, 
with a truer rapprochement between the " schools " 
of garden design, I find several catalogues of eminent 
firms illustrating their reproductions of some beauti- 
ful French and Dutch work. 

Personally, I have a furtive sympathy with the 
conceited Frenchmen. It seems to me that it would 
be a great shame to allow the growths upon a fine 
piece of Treillage to become so gross as to conceal 
all the design of the joinery. Therefore I hold that 
such ambitious climbers as Dorothy Perkins or Crim- 
son Rambler should be provided with an unsightly 
wall and bade to make it sightly, and that to the more 
graceful and less distracting clematis should any first- 
class woodwork be assigned. This scheme will give 
both sides a chance in the summer, and in the winter 
there will be before our eyes a beautiful thing to look 
upon, even though it is no longer supporting a plant, 
and so fulfilling the ostensible object of its existence. 

There should be no limit to the decorative possi- 
bilities of the Treillage lath. A whole building can 
be constructed on this basis. I have seen two or three 
very successful attempts in such a direction in Hol- 
land; and quite enchanting did they seem, overclam- 
bered by Dutch honeysuckle. I learned that all were 
copied from eighteenth century designs. I saw an- 
other Dutch design in an English garden in the North. 



230 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

It took the form of a sheltered and canopied seat. It 
had a round tower at each side and a gracefully curved 
back. The " mesh " used in this little masterpiece 
was one of four inches. It was painted in a tint that 
looks best of all in garden word — the gray of the 
echeveria glauca, and the blooms of a beautiful Agla'ia 
rose were playing hide-and-seek among the laths of 
the roof. I see no reason why hollow pillars for roses 
should not be made on the Treillage principle. I have 
seen such pillars supporting the canopied roof of more 
than one balcony in front of houses in Brighton and 
Hove. I fancy that at one time these were fashion- 
able in such places. In his fine work entitled The 
English Home from Charles I. to George IV., Mr. J. 
Alfred Gotch gives two illustrations of Treillage 
adapted to balconies. 

But to my mind, its most effective adaptation is in 
association with a pergola, especially if near the house. 
To be sure, if the space to be filled is considerable, the 
work for both sides would be somewhat expensive; 
but then the cost of such things is very elastic; it is 
wholly dependent upon the degrees of elaboration in 
the design. But in certain situations a pergola built 
up in this way may be made to do duty as an ante- 
room or a loggia, and as such it gives a good return 
for an expenditure of money ; and if constructed with 
substantial uprights — I should recommend the em- 
ployment of an iron core an inch in diameter for these, 
covered, I need hardly say, with the laths — and 
painted every second year, the structure should last 
for half a century. Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema car- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 231 

ried out a marvellous scheme of this type at his house 
in St. John's Wood. It was on a Dutch plan, but 
was not a copy of any existing arrangement of gar- 
dens. I happen to know that the design was elabor- 
ated by himself and his wife on their leaving his first 
St. John's Wood home: it was a model of what may 
be called " Vhaut Treillage." 

Once again I would venture to point out the advan- 
tage of having a handsome thing to look at during 
the winter months when an ordinary pergola looks 
its worst. 

Regarding pergolas in general a good deal might 
be written. Their popularity in England just now 
is well deserved. There is scarcely a garden of any 
dimensions that is reckoned complete unless it en- 
closes one within its walls. A more admirable means 
of dividing a ground space so as to make two gardens 
of different types, could scarcely be devised, in the ab- 
sence of a yew or box growth of hedge ; nor could one 
imagine a more interesting way of passing from the 
house to the garden than beneath such a roof of roses. 
In this case it should play the part of one of those 
" vistas " which were regarded as indispensable in the 
eighteenth century. It should have a legitimate en- 
trance and it should not stop abruptly. If the ex- 
igencies of space make for such abruptness, not a mo- 
ment's delay there should be in the planting of a large 
climbing shrub on each side of the exit so as to em- 
bower it, so to speak. A vase or a short pillar should 
compel the dividing of the path a little further on, 
and the grass verge — I am assuming the most awk- 



232 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

ward of exits — should be rounded off in every direc- 
tion, so as to cause the ornament to become the fea- 
ture up to which the pergola path is leading. I may 
mention incidentally at this moment that such an 
isolated ornament as I have suggested gives a legiti- 
mate excuse for dividing any garden walk that has 
a tendency to weary the eye by its persistent straight- 
ness. Some years ago no one ever thought it neces- 
sary to make an excuse for a curve in a garden walk. 
The gardener simply got out his iron and cut out 
whatever curve he pleased on each side, and the thing 
was done. But nowadays one must have a natural 
reason for every deflection in a path ; and an obstacle 
is introduced only to be avoided. 

I need hardly say that there are pergolas and per- 
golas. I saw one that cost between two and three 
thousand pounds in a garden beyond Beaulieu, be- 
tween Mont Boron and Monte Carlo — an ideal site. 
It was made up of porphyry columns with Corinthian 
carved capitals and wrought-iron work of a beautiful 
design, largely, but not lavishly, gilt, as a sort of 
frieze running from pillar to pillar; a bronze vase 
stood between each of the panels, and the handles of 
these were also gilt. I have known of quite respecta- 
ble persons creating quite presentable pergolas for 
less money. In that favoured part of the world, how- 
ever, everything bizarre and extravagant seems to 
find a place and to look in keeping with its surround- 
ings. 

The antithesis to this gorgeous and thoroughly 
beautiful piece of work I have seen in many gardens 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 233 

in England. It is the " rustic " pergola, a thing that 
may be acquired for a couple of pounds and that 
may, with attention, last a couple of years. Anything 
is better than this — no pergola at all is better than 
this. In Italy one sees along the roadsides numbers 
of these structures overgrown with vines; but never 
yet did I see one that was not either in a broken- 
down condition or rapidly approaching such a condi- 
tion; although the poles are usually made of chestnut 
which should last a long time — unlike our larch, the 
life of which when cut into poles and inserted in the 
cold earth does not as a rule go beyond the third year. 
But there is something workable in this line be- 
tween the three-thousand-pounder of the Riviera, and 
the three-pounder of Clapham. If people will only 
keep their eyes open for posts suitable for the pillars 
of a pergola, they will be able to collect a sufficient 
number to make a start with inside a year. The re- 
mainder of the woodwork I should recommend being 
brought already shaped and creosoted from some of 
those large sawmills where such work is made a spe- 
ciality of. But there is no use getting anything that 
is not strong and durable, and every upright pillar 
should be embedded in concrete or cement. For one 
of my own pergolas — I do not call them pergolas but 
colonnades — I found a disused telegraph pole and 
sawed it into lengths of thirty inches each. These I 
sank eighteen inches in the ground at regular inter- 
vals and on each I doweled two oak poles six inches 
in diameter. They are standing well; for telegraph 
posts which have been properly treated are nearly as 



234 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

durable as iron. All the woodwork for this I got 
ready sawn and " dipped " from a well-known fac- 
tory at Croydon. It is eighty feet long and paved 
throughout. One man was able to put it up inside 
a fine fortnight in the month of January. 

A second colonnade that I have is under forty feet 
in length. I made one side of it against a screen of 
sweetbrier roses which had grown to a height of 
twenty feet in five years. The making of it was sug- 
gested to me by the chance I had of buying at house- 
breaker's price a number of little columns taken from 
a shop that was being pulled down to give place, as 
usual, to a new cinema palace. 

An amusing sidelight upon the imperiousness of 
fashion was afforded us when the painter set to work 
upon these. They had once been treated in that form 
of decoration known as " oak grained " — that pale 
yellow colour touched with an implement technically 
called a comb, professing to give to ordinary deal the 
appearance of British oak, and possibly deceiving a 
person here and there who had never seen oak. But 
when my painter began to burn off this stuff he dis- 
covered that the column had actually been papered 
and then painted and grained. This made his work 
easy, for he was able to tear the paper away in strips. 
But when he had done this he made the further dis- 
covery that the wood underneath was good oak with 
a natural grain showing! 

Could anything be more ridiculous than the fash- 
ion of sixty or seventy years ago, when the art of 
graining had reached its highest level? Here were 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 235 

beautiful oak columns which only required to be 
waxed to display to full advantage the graceful nat- 
ural " feathering " of the wood, papered over and 
then put into the hands of the artist to make it by 
his process of " oak-graining " as unlike oak as the 
basilica of St. Mark is unlike Westminster Abbey! 

But for a large garden where everything is on a 
heroic scale, the only suitable pergola is one made up 
of high brick or stone piers, with massive oak beams 
for the roof. Such a structure will last for a century 
or two, improving year by year. The only question 
to consider is the proper proportions that it should 
assume — the relations of the length to the breadth 
and to the height. On such points I dare not speak. 
The architect who has had experience of such struc- 
tures must be consulted. I have seen some that have 
been carried out without reference to the profession, 
and to my mind their proportions were not right. 
One had the semblance of being stunted, another was 
certainly not sufficiently broad by at least two feet. 

In this connection I may be pardoned if I give it 
as my opinion that most pergolas suffer from lack 
of breadth. Six feet is the narrowest breadth pos- 
sible for one that is eight feet high to the cross beams. 
I think that a pergola in England should be paved, 
not in that contemptible fashion, properly termed 
"crazy," but with either stone slabs or paving tiles; 
if one can afford to have the work done in panels, 
so much the better. In this way nothing looks bet- 
ter than small bricks set in herring-bone patterns. 
If one can afford a course of coloured bricks, so much 



236 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

the better. The riotous gaiety of colour overhead 
should be responded to in some measure underfoot. 

There is no reason against, but many strong rea- 
sons for, interrupting the lines of a long pergola by 
making a dome of open woodwork between the four 
middle columns of support — assuming that all the rest 
of the woodwork is straight — and creating a curved 
alcove with a seat between the two back supports, 
thus forming at very little extra expense, an addi- 
tional bower to the others which will come into exist- 
ence year by year in a garden that is properly looked 
after. 

When I was a schoolboy I was brought by my desk- 
mate to his father's place, and escorted round the 
grounds by his sister, for whom I cherished a passion 
that I hoped was not hopeless. This was while my 
friend was busy looking after the nets for the lawn 
tennis. There were three summer-houses in various 
parts of the somewhat extensive grounds, and in every 
one of them we came quite too suddenly upon a pair 
of quite too obvious lovers. 

The sister cicerone hurried past each with averted 
eyes — after the first glance — and looked at me and 
smiled. 

We were turning into another avenue after pass- 
ing the third of these love-birds, when she stopped 
abruptly. 

" We had better not go on any farther," said she. 

"Oh, why not?" I cried. 

" Well, there's another summer-house down there 
among the lilacs," she replied. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 237 

We stood there while she looked around, plainly 
in search of a route that should be less distracting. 
It was at this moment of indecision that I gazed at 
her. I thought that I had never seen her look so 
lovely. I felt myself trembling. I know that my 
eyes were fixed upon the ground — I could not 
have spoken the words if I had looked up to her 
— she was a good head and shoulder taller than I 
was: — 

" Look here, Miss Fanny, there may be no one in 
the last of the summer-houses. Let us go there and 
sit — sit — the same as the others." 

" Oh, no; I should be afraid," said she. 

" Oh, I swear to you that you shall have no cause, 
Miss Fanny ; I know what is due to the one you love ; 
you will be quite safe — sacred." 

"What do you know about the one I love?" she 
asked — and there was a smile in her voice. 

" I know the one who loves you," I said warmly. 

" I'm so glad," she cried. " I know that he is look- 
ing for me everywhere, and if he found us together 
in a summer-house he would be sure to kill you. Cap- 
tain Tyson is a frightfully jealous man, and you are 
too nice a boy to be killed. Do you mind running 
round by the rhododendrons and telling Bob that he 
may wear my tennis shoes to-day? I got a new pair 
yesterday." 

I went slowly toward the rhododendrons. When I 
got beyond their shelter I looked back. 

I did not see her, but I saw the sprightly figure 
of a naval man crossing the grass toward where I 



238 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

had left her, and I knew him to be Commander 
Tyson, R.N. 

Their second son is Commander Tyson, R. N., to- 
day. 

But from that hour I made up my mind that a 
properly designed garden should have at least five 
summer-houses. 

I have just made my fifth. 



CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH 

I am sure that the most peaceful part of our Garden 
of Peace is the Place of Roses. The place of roses 
in the time of roses is one bower. It grew out of the 
orchard ground which I had turned into a lawn in 
exchange for the grassy space which I had turned into 
the House Garden. The grass came very rapidly 
when I had grubbed up the roots of the old plums 
and cherries. But then we found that the stone-edged 
beds and the central fountain had not really taken 
possession, so to speak, of the House Garden. This 
had still the character of a lawn for all its bed- 
ding, and could not be mown in less than two 
hours. 

And just as I was becoming impressed with this 
fact, a gentle general dealer came to me with the in- 
quiry if a tall wooden pillar would be of any use to 
me. I could not tell him until I had seen it, and when 
I had seen it and bought it and had it conveyed home 
I could not tell him. 

It was a fluted column of wood, nearly twenty 
feet high and two in diameter, with a base and a 
carved Corinthian capital — quite an imposing object, 
but, as usual, the people at the auction were so startled 
by having brought before them something to which 

239 



240 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

they were unaccustomed, they would not make a bid 
for it, and my dealer, who has brought me many an 
embarrassing treasure, got it for the ten shillings at 
which he had started it. 

It lay on the grass where it had been left by the 
carters, giving to the landscape for a whole week the 
semblance of the place of the Parthenon or the Acrop- 
olis; but on the seventh day I clearly saw that one 
cannot possess a white elephant without making some 
sacrifices for that distinction, and I resolved to sac- 
rifice the new lawn to my hasty purchase. There are 
few things in the world dearer than a bargain, and 
none more irresistible. But, as it turned out, this 
was altogether an exceptional thing — as a matter of 
fact, all my bargains are. I made it stand in the 
centre of the lawn and I saw the place transformed. 

It occupied no more than a patch less than a yard 
in diameter; but it dominated the whole neighbour- 
hood. On one side of the place there is a range of 
shrubs on a small mound, making people who stand 
by the new pond of water-lilies' believe that they have 
come to the bottom of the garden; on another side 
is the old Saxon earthwork, now turned into an ex- 
panse of things herbaceous, with a long curved grass 
path under the ancient castle walls; down the full 
length of the third side runs a pergola, giving no one 
a glimpse of a great breadth of rose-beds or of the 
colonnade beyond, where the sweet-briers have their 
own way. 

There was no reason that I could see (now that 
I had set my heart on the scheme) why I should not 




THE ENTRANCE TO A GREENHOUSE 



[Page 240 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 241 

set up a gigantic rose pillar in the centre of the lawn 
and see what would happen. 

What actually did happen before another year had 
passed was the erecting of a tall pillar which looked 
so lonely in the midst of the grass — a lighthouse mark- 
ing a shoal in a green sea — that I made four large 
round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty 
feet, and set up a nine-foot pillar in the centre of 
each, planting climbing roses of various sorts around 
it, hoping that in due time the whole should be in- 
corporated and form a ring o' roses about the tower- 
ing centre column. 

It really took no more than two years to bring to 
fruition my most sanguine hopes, and now there are 
four rose-tents with hundreds of prolific shoots above 
the apex of each, clinging with eager fingers to the 
wires which I have brought to them from the top of 
the central pillar, and threatening in time to form a 
complete canopy between forty and fifty feet in diam- 
eter. 

In the shade of these ambitious things one sits in 
what I say is the most peaceful part of the whole place 
of peace. Even " winter and rough weather " may 
be regarded with complacency from the well- sheltered 
seats; and every year toward the end of November 
Rosamund brings into the house some big sprays of 
ramblers and asks her mother if there is any boracic 
lint handy. He jests at scars who never felt an Ards 
Rover scrape down his arm in resisting lawful arrest. 
But in July and August, looking down upon the 
growing canopy from the grass walk above the her- 



242 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

baceous terrace, is like realising Byron's awful long- 
ing for all the rosy lips of all the rosy girls in the 
world to " become one mouth " in order that he might 
" kiss them all at once from North to South." There 
they are, thousands and tens of thousands of rosy 
mouths; but not for kisses, even separately. Hey- 
wood, who, being a painter, is a thoroughly trust- 
worthy consultant on all artistic matters, assures me 
that Byron was a fool, and that his longing for a uni- 
fication of a million moments of aesthetic delight was 
unworthy of his reputation. There may be some- 
thing in this. I am content to look down upon our 
eager roses with no more of a longing than that Sep- 
tember were as far off as Christmas. 

It was our antiquarian neighbour who, walking on 
the terrace one day in mid-July, told us of a beautiful 
poem which he had just seen in the customary corner 
of the Gazette — the full name of the paper is The 
Yardley Gazette, East Longworth Chronicle, and 
Nethershire Observer, but one would no more think 
of giving it all its titles in ordinary conversation than 
of giving the Duke of Wellington all his. It is with 
us as much the Gazette as if no other Gazette had ever 
been published. But it prints a copy of verses, an- 
cient or modern, every week, and our friend had got 
hold of a gem. The roses reminded him of it. He 
could only recollect the first two lines, but they were 
striking : — 



" There's a bower of rose by Bendameer's stream 
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long." 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 243 

Bendameer was some place in China, he thought, or 
perhaps Japan — but for the matter of that it might 
not be a real locality, but merely a place invented by 
the poet. Anyhow, he would in future call the terrace 
walk Bendameer, for could any one imagine a finer 
bower of roses than that beneath us? He did not 
believe that Bendameer could beat it. 

If our friend had talked to Sir Foster Fraser — the 
only person I ever met who had been to Bendameer's 
stream — he might have expressed his belief much more 
enthusiastically. On returning from his bicycle tour 
round the world, and somewhat disillusioned by the 
East, ready to affirm that fifty years of Europe were 
better than a cycle in Cathay, he told me that Ben- 
dameer's stream was a complete fraud. It was noth- 
ing but a muddy puddle oozing its way through an 
uninteresting district. 

In accordance with our rule, neither Dorothy nor I 
went further than to confess that the lines were very 
sweet. 

" I'll get you a copy with pleasure," he cried. " I 
knew you would like them, you are both so literary; 
and you know how literary I am myself — I cut out 
all the poems that appear in the Gazette. It's a hob- 
by, and elevating. I suppose you don't think it pos- 
sible to combine antiquarian tastes and poetical." 
Dorothy assured him that she could see a distinct con- 
nection between the two; and he went on: " There was 
another about roses the week before. The editor is 
clearly a man of taste, and he puts in only things 
that are appropriate to the season. The other one 



244 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

was about a garden — quite pretty, only perhaps a lit- 
tle vague. I could not quite make out what it meant 
at places ; but I intend to get it off by heart, so I wrote 
it down in my pocket-book. Here it is : — 

" Rosy is the north, 
Rosy is the south, 
Rosy are her cheeks 
And a rose her mouth." 

Now what do you think of it? I call it very pretty — 
not so good, on the whole, as the bower of roses by 
Bendameer's stream, but still quite nice. You would 
not be afraid to let one of your little girls read it — 
yes, every line." 

Dorothy said that she would not; but then Dor- 
othy is afraid of nothing — not even an antiquarian. 

He returned to us the next day with the full text 
— only embellished with half a dozen of the Gazette's 
misprints — of the Lalla Rookh song, and read it out 
to us in full, but failing now and again to get into 
the lilt of Moore's melodious anapaests — a marvellous 
feat, considering Jiow they sing and swing themselves 
along from line to line. But that was not enough. 
He had another story for us — fresh, quite fresh, from 
the stock of a brother antiquarian who recollected it, 
he said, when watching the players on the bowling- 
green. 

" I thought I should not lose a minute in coming 
to you with it," he said. " You are so close to the 
bowling-green here, it should have additional interest 
in your eyes. The story is that Nelson was playing 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 245 

bowls when some one rushed in to say that the Spanish 
Armada was in sight. But the news did not put him 
off his game. ' We'll have plenty of time to finish our 
game and beat the Spaniards afterwards,' he cried; 
and sure enough he went on with the game to the 
end. There was a man for you! " 

" And who won? " asked Dorothy innocently. 

" That's just the question I put to my friend," he 
cried. " The story is plainly unfinished. He did not 
say whether Nelson and his partner won his game 
against the other players; but you may be sure that 
he did." 

"He didn't say who was Nelson's partner?" said 
Dorothy. 

" No, I have told you all that he told me," he re- 
plied. 

" I shouldn't be surprised to hear that his partner 
was a man named Drake," said I. " A senior partner 
too in that transaction and others. But the story is 
a capital one and shows the Englishman as he is 
to-day. Why, it was only the year before the war 
that there was a verse going about, — 

* I was playing golf one day 
When the Germans landed ; 
All our men had run away, 

All our ships were stranded. 
And the thought of England's shame 
Almost put me off my game.' " 

Our antiquarian friend looked puzzled for some 
time; then he shook his head gravely, saying: — 



246 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" I don't like that. It's a gross libel upon our 
brave men — and on our noble sailors too: I heard 
some one say in a speech the other day that there 
are no better seamen in the world than are in the 
British Navy. Our soldiers did not run away, and 
all our ships were not stranded. It was one of the 
German lies to say so. And what I say is that it was 
very lucky for the man who wrote that verse that 
there was a British fleet to prevent the Germans land- 
ing. They never did succeed in landing, I'm sure, 
though I was talking to a man who had it on good 
authority that there were five U-boats beginning to 
disembark some crack regiments of Hun cavalry 
when a British man-o'-war — one, mind you — a single 
ship — came in sight, and they all bundled back to 
their blessed U-boats in double quick time." 

" I think you told me about that before," said I — 
and he had. " It was the same person who brought 
the first news of the Russian troops going through 
England — he had seen them on the platform of 
Crewe stamping off the snow they had brought on 
their boots from Archangel; and afterwards he had 
been talking with a soldier who had seen the angels 
at Mons, and had been ordered home to be one of the 
shooting party at the Tower of London, when Prince 
Louis was court-martialled and sentenced." 

" Quite true," he cried. " My God! what an expe- 
rience for any one man to go through. But we are 
living in extraordinary times — that's what I've never 
shrunk from saying, no matter who was present — 
extraordinary times." 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 247 

I could not but agree with him. I did not say that 
what I thought the most extraordinary feature of the 
times was the extraordinary credulity of so many 
people. The story of the Mons angels was perhaps 
the most remarkable of all the series. A journalist 
sitting in his office in London simply introduced in 
a newspaper article the metaphor of a host of angels 
holding up the advancing Germans, and within a 
week scores of people in England had talked with 
soldiers who had seen those imaginary angels and 
were ready to give a poulterer's description of them, 
as Sheridan said some one would do if he introduced 
the Phoenix into his Drury Lane Address. 

It was no use the journalist explaining that his 
angels were purely imaginary ones ; people said, when 
you pointed this out to them: — 

" That may be so ; but these were the angels he 
imagined." 

Clergymen preached beautiful sermons on the 
angel host; and I heard of a man who sold for half 
a crown a feather which had dropped from the wing 
of one of the angels who had come on duty before he 
had quite got over his moult. 

When Dorothy heard this she said she was sure 
that it was no British soldier who had shown the white 
feather in France during that awful time. 

" If they were imaginary angels, the white feather 
must have been imaginary too," said Olive, the prac- 
tical one. 

" One of the earliest of angel observers was an ass, 
and the tradition has been carefully adhered to ever 



248 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

since," said Friswell, and after that there was, of 
course, no use talking further. 

But when we were still laughing over our anti- 
quarian and his novelties in the form of verse and 
anecdote, • Friswell himself appeared with a news- 
paper in his hand, and he too was laughing. 

It was over the touching letter of an actress to her 
errant husband, entreating him to return and all 
would be forgiven. I had read it and smiled; so had 
Dorothy, and wept. 

But it really was a beautiful letter, and I said so 
to Friswell. 

" It is the most beautiful of the four actresses' let- 
ters to errant spouses for Divorce Court purposes 
that I have read within the past few months," said 
he. " But they are all beautiful — all touching. It 
makes one almost ready to condone the sin that re- 
sults in such an addition to the literature of the Law 
Courts. I wonder who is the best person to go to 
for such a letter — some men must make a speciality 
of that sort of work to meet the demands of the time. 
But wouldn't it be dreadful if the errant husband 
became so convicted of his trespass through reading 
the wife's appeal to return, that he burst into tears, 
called a taxi and drove home! But these Divorce 
Court pleading letters are of great value profes- 
sionally — they have quite blanketed the old lost jewel- 
case stunt as a draw. I was present and assisted in 
the reception given by the audience to the lady whose 
beautiful letter had appeared in the paper in the 
morning. She was overwhelmed. She had made 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 249 

up pale in view of that reception; and there was 
something in her throat that prevented her from 
going on with her words for some time. The ' poor 
things ! ' that one heard on all sides showed how truly 
sympathetic is a British audience." 

" I refuse to listen to your cynicism," cried Doro- 
thy; " I prefer to believe that people are good rather 
than bad." 

" And so do I, my dear lady," said he, laughing. 
" But don't you see that if you prefer to think good 
of all people, you cannot exclude the poor husband 
of the complete letter-writer, and if you believe good 
of him and not bad, you must believe that his charm- 
ing wife is behaving badly in trying to get a divorce." 

" She doesn't want a divorce: she wants him to 
come back to her and writes to him begging him to 
do so," said she. 

" And such a touching letter too," I added. 

" I have always found ' the profession,' as they 
call themselves, more touchy than touching," said he. 
" But I admit that I never was so touched as when, 
at the funeral of a brother artist, the leading actor of 
that day walked behind the coffin with the broken- 
hearted widow of the deceased on his right arm and 
the broken-hearted mistress on the left. Talk of 
stage pathos ! " 

" For my part, I shall do nothing of the sort," said 
I sharply. " I think,. Friswell, that you sometimes 
forget that it was you who gave this place the name 
of A Garden of Peace. You introduce controversial 
topics — The Actor is the title of one of these, The 



250 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Actress is the title of the other. Let us have done 
with them, and talk poetry instead." 

"Lord of the Garden of Peace! as if poetry was 
the antithesis of polemics — verses of controversies!'* 
cried he. " Never mind! give us a poem — of The 
Peace." 

" I wish I could," said I. " The two copies of 
verses which, as you know, without having read 
them, I contributed to the literature — I mean the 
writings — in connection with the war could scarcely 
be called pacific." 

" They were quite an effective medium for getting 
rid of his superfluous steam," said Dorothy to him. 
" I made no attempt to prevent his writing them." 

" It would have been like sitting on the safety- 
valve, wouldn't it? " said he. " I think that literature 
would not have suffered materially if a good number 
of safety-valves had been sat upon by stouter wives 
of metre-engineers than you will ever be, O guardian 
lady of the Garden of Peace! The poets of the pres- 
ent hour have got much to recommend them to the 
kindly notice of readers of taste, but they have all 
fallen short of the true war note on their bugles. Per- 
haps when they begin to pipe of peace they will show 
themselves better masters of the reed than of the 
conch." 

" Whatever some of them may be " I began, 

when he broke in. 

" Say some of us, my friend : you can't dissociate 
yourself from your pals in the dock : you will be sen- 
tenced en bloc, believe me." 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 251 

" Well, whatever we may be we make a better show 
than the Marlborough Muses or the Wellington or 
the Nelson Muses did. What would be thought of 
The Campaign if it were to appear to-morrow, I 
wonder. But it did more in advancing the interests 
of Addison than the complete Spectator." 

" Yes, although some feeble folk did consider that 
one bit of it was verging on the blasphemous — that 
about riding on the whirlwind and directing the 
storm," remarked Friswell; he had a good memory 
for things verging on the blasphemous. 

" The best war poem is the one that puts into 
literary form the man in the street yelling ' hurrah ! ' " 
said I. " If the shout is not spontaneous, it sounds 
stilted and it is worthless." 

" I believe you," said Friswell. " If your verse 
does not find an echo in the heart of the rabble that 
run after a soldiers' band, it is but as the sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbals that crash on the empty 
air. But touching the poets of past campaigns " 

" I was thinking of Scott's Waterloo" said I ; 
" yes, and Byron's stanzas in Childe Harold, and 
somebody's J Twas in Trafalgar's Bay, We saw the 
Frenchmen lay — ' the Frenchmen lay,' mind you — 
that's the most popular of all the lays, thanks to 
Braham's music and Braham's tenor that gave it a 
start. I think we have done better than any of those." 

" But have you done better than Scot's wha* hae 
wi' Wallace bled? or Of Nelson and the North, Sing 
the glorious day's renown? or Ye Mariners of Eng- 
land, That guard our native seas? or Not a drum 



252 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

was heard or a funeral note? — I doubt it. And to 
come down to a later period, what about the lilt of 
the Light Brigade at Balaclava, by one Tennyson? 
Will any of the poems of 1914 show the same vitality 
as these? " 

" The vital test of poetry is not its vitality," said 
I, " any more than being a best-seller is a test of a 
good novel. But I think that when a winnowing of 
the recent harvest takes place in a year or two, when 
we become more critical than is possible for a people 
just emerging from the flames that make us all see 
red, you will find that the harvest of sound poetry 
will be a record one. We have still the roar of the 
thunderstorm in our ears; when an earthquake is just 
over is not the time for one to be asked to say whether 
the Pathetique or the Moonlight Sonata is the more 
exquisite." 

"Perhaps," said Friswell doubtfully. "But I 
allow that you have 'jined your flats' better than 
Tennyson did. The unutterable vulgarity of that 
' gallant six hunderd,' because it happened that 
' some one had blundered,' instead of ' blundred,' 
will not be found in the Armageddon band of buglers. 
But I don't believe that anything so finished as 
Wolfe's Burial of Sir John Moore will come to the 
surface of the melting-pot — I think that the melting- 
pot suggests more than your harvest. Your harvest 
hints at the swords being turned into ploughshares; 
my melting-pot at the bugles being thrown into the 
crucible. What have you to say about ' Not a drum 
was heard'?" 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 253 

" That poem is the finest elegy ever written," said 
I definitely. " The author, James Wolfe, occupies 
the place among elegists that single-speech Hamilton 
does among orators, or Liddell and Scott in a library 
of humour. From the first line to the last, no false 
note is sounded in that magnificent funeral march. 
It is one grand monotone throughout. It cannot be 
spoken except in a low monotone. It never rises and 
it never falls until the last line is reached, ' We left 
him alone in his glory.' " 

" And the strangest thing about it is that it ap- 
peared first in the poets' corner of a wretched little 
Irish newspaper — the Newry Telegraph, I believe it 
was called," said Dorothy — it was Dorothy's reading 
of the poem that first impressed me with its beauty. 

" The more obscure the crypt in which its body was 
buried, the more — the more — I can't just express the 
idea that I'm groping after," said Friswell. 

" I should like to help you," said Dorothy. " Strike 
a match for me, and I'll try to follow you out of the 
gloom." 

" It's something like this: the poem itself seems to 
lead you into the gloom of a tomb, so that there is 
nothing incongruous in its disappearing into the 
obscurity of a corner of a wretched rag of a news- 
paper — queer impression for any one to have about 
such a thing, isn't it?" 

" Queer, but — well, it was but the body that was 
buried, the soul of the poetry could not be consigned 
to the sepulchre, even though ' Resurgani ' was cut 
upon the stone." 



254 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

" You have strolled away from me," said I. " All 
that I was thinking about Wolfe and that blessed 
Newry Telegraph, was expressed quite adequately by 
the writer of another Elegy: — 



" Full many a gem of purest ray serene, 

The dark unf athomed caves of ocean bear ; 
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 

That was a trite reflection ; and as apposite as yours, 
Friswell; unless you go on to assume that through 
the desert air there buzzed a bee to carry off the soul 
of the blushing flower and cause it to fertilise a whole 
garden, so that the desert was made to blossom like 
the rose." 

" Who was the bee that rescued the poem from the 
desert sheet that enshrouded it? " asked Dorothy. 

" I have never heard," I said, nor had Friswell. 

There was a long pause before he gave a laugh, 
saying — 

" I wonder if you will kick me out of your garden 
when I tell you the funny analogy to all this that the 
mention of the word desert forced upon me." 

" Try us," said I. " We know you." 

" The thought that I had was that there are more 
busy bees at work than one would suppose; and the 
mention of the desert recalled to my mind what I read 
somewhere of the remarkable optimism of a flea which 
a man found on his foot after crossing the desert of 
the Sahara. It had lived on in the sand, goodness 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 255 

knows how long, on the chance of some animal pass- 
ing within the radius of a leap and so carrying it 
back to a congenial and not too rasorial a civilisation. 
How many thousand mllion chances to one there were 
that it should not be rescued; yet its chance came at 
last." 

° Meaning? " 

" Well, my flea is your bee, and where there are 
no bees there may be plenty of fleas." 

" Yes; only my bee comes with healing in its wings, 
and your flea is the bearer of disease," said I; and I 
knew that I had got the better of him there, though 
I was not so sure that he knew it. 

Friswell is a queer mixture. 

After another pause, he said, — 

" By the way, the mention of Campbell and his 
group brought back to me one of the most popular 
of the poems of the period — Lord UlUn's Daughter. 
You recollect it, of course." 

" A line or two." 

" Well, it begins, you know: — 

" A chieftain to the Highlands bound, 
Cries, ' Boatman, do not tarry, 
And I'll give thee a silver pound, 
To row us o'er the ferry.' 

Now, for long I felt that it was too great a strain 
upon our credulity to ask us to accept the statement 
that a Scotsman would offer a ferryman a pound for 
a job of the market value of a bawbee; but all at once 
the truth flashed upon me: the pound was a pound 



256 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Scots, or one shilling and eightpence of our money. 
You see? " 

"Yes, I see," said Dorothy; "but still it sounds 
extravagant. A Highland Chief — one and eight- 
pence! The ferryman never would have got it." 

I fancied that we had exhausted some of the most 
vital questions bearing upon the questionable poetry 
of the present and the unquestionable poetry of the 
past; but I was mistaken; for after dinner I had a 
visit from Mr. Gilbert. 

But I must give Mr. Gilbert a little chapter to 
himself. 



CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST 

Of course I had known for a long time that Mr. Gil- 
bert was " quite a superior man " — that was the 
phrase in which the Rural Dean referred to him when 
recommending me to apply to him for information 
respecting a recalcitrant orchid which had refused one 
year to do what it had been doing the year before. 
He was indeed " quite a superior man," but being a 
florist he could never be superior to his business. No 
man can be superior to a florist, when the florist is 
an orchidtect as well. I went to Mr. Gilbert and Mr. 
Gilbert came to me, and all was right. That was long 
ago. We talked orchids all through that year and 
then, by way of lightening our theme, we began to 
talk of roses and such like frivolities, but everything 
he said was said in perfect taste. Though naturally, 
living his life on terms of absolute intimacy with 
orchids, he could not regard roses seriously, yet I 
never heard him say a disrespectful word about them: 
he gave me to understand that he regarded the ma- 
jority of rosarians as quite harmless — they had their 
hobby, and why should they not indulge in it, he 
asked. " After all, rosarians are God's creatures like 
the rest of us," he said, with a tolerant smile. And 
I must confess that, for all my knowledge of his 

257 



258 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

being a superior man, he startled me a little by 
adding, — 

"The orchid is epic and the rose lyric, sir; but 
every one knows how an incidental lyric lightens up 
the hundred pages of an epic. Oh, yes, roses have 
their place in a properly organised horticultural 
scheme." 

" I believe you are right, now that I come to look 
at the matter in that light," said I. " You find a 
relaxation in reading poetry? " I added. 

" I have made a point of reading some verses every 
night for the past twenty-five years, sir," he replied. 
" I find that's the only way by which I can keep 
myself up to the mark." 

" I can quite understand that," said I. " Flowers 
are the lyrics that, as you say, lighten the great epic 
of Creation. Where would our poets be without their 
flowers? " 

" They make their first appeal to the poet, sir; but 
the worst of it is that every one who can string to- 
gether a few lines about a flower believes himself to 
be a poet. No class of men have treated flowers 
worse than our poets — even the best of them are so 
vague in their references to flowers as to irritate me." 

" In what way, Mr. Gilbert? " 

"Well, you know, sir, they will never tell us 
plainly just what they are driving at. For instance 
— we were speaking of roses, just now — well, we have 
roses and roses by the score in poems ; but how seldom 
do we find the roses specified! There's Matthew 
Arnold, for example ; he wrote " Strew on her roses, 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 259 

roses"; but he did not say whether he wanted her 
to be strewn with hybrid teas, Wichuraianas, or poly- 
anthas. He does not even suggest the colour. Now, 
could anything be more vague? It makes one believe 
that he was quite indifferent on the point, which 
would, of course, be doing him a great injustice: all 
these funeral orders are specified, down to the last 
violets and Stephanotis. Then we have, " It was the 
time of roses " — now, there's another ridiculously 
vague phrase. Why could the poet not have said 
whether he had in his mind the ordinary brier or an 
autumn-flowering William Allen Richardson or a 
Gloire de Dijon? But that is not nearly so irritating 
as Tennyson is in places. You remember his " Flower 
in the crannied wall." There he leaves a reader in 
doubt as to what the plant really was. If it was 
Saracha Hapelioides, he should have called it a herb, 
or if it was simply the ordinary Scolopendrium 
marginatum he should have called it a fern. If it 
was one of the Scuvifragece he left his readers quite a 
bewildering choice. My own impression is that it 
belonged to the Evaizoonia section — probably the 
Aizoon sempervivoides, though it really might have 
been the cartilaginea. Why should we be left to 
puzzle over the thing? But for that matter, both 
Shakespeare and Milton are most flagrant offenders, 
though I acknowledge that the former now and again 
specifies his roses: the musk and damask were his 
favourites. But why should he not say whether it 
was Thymus Serpyllum or atropurpureus he alluded 
to on that bank? He merely says, "Whereon the 



260 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

wild thyme blows." It is really that vagueness, that 
absence of simplicity — which has made poetry so un- 
popular. Then think of the trouble it must be to a 
foreigner when he comes upon a line comparing a 
maiden to a lily, without saying what particular liliwm 
is meant. An Indian squaw is like a lily — lilium 
Brownii; a Japanese may appropriately be said to be 
like the lilium sulphureum. Recovering from a severe 
attack of measles a young woman suggests lilium 
speciosum; but that is just the moment when she 
makes a poor appeal to a poet. To say that a maiden 
is like a lily conveys nothing definite to the mind ; but 
that sort of neutrality is preferable to the creation of 
a false impression, so doing her a great injustice by 
suggesting it may be that her complexion is a bright 
orange picked out with spots of purple." 

That was what our Mr. Gilbert said to me more 
than a year ago; and now he comes to me before I 
have quite recovered from the effects of that discus- 
sion with Friswell, and after a few professional re- 
marks respecting a new orchid acquisition, begins: 
" Might I take the liberty of reading you a little thing 
which I wrote last night as an experiment in the 
direction of the reform I advocated a year ago when 
referring to the vagueness of poets' flowers? I don't 
say that the verses have any poetical merit; but I 
claim for them a definiteness and a lucidity that 
should appeal to all readers who, like myself, are tired 
of the slovenly and loose way in which poets drag 
flowers into their compositions." 

I assured him that nothing would give me greater 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 261 

pleasure than to hear his poem; and he thanked me 
and said that the title was, The Florist to his Bride. 
This was his poem: — 

Do you remember, dearest, that wild eve, 
When March came blustering o'er the land? 
We stood together, hand in hand, 
Watching the slate-gray waters heave — 
Hearing despairing boughs behind us grieve. 

It seemed as if no forest voice was dumb. 

All Nature joining in one cry; 

The Ampelopsis Veitchii, 
Giving gray hints of green to come, 
Shrank o'er the leafless Primus Avium. 

Desolate seemed the grove of Coniferia, 

Evergreen as deciduous ; 

Hopeless the hour seemed unto us ; 
Helpless our beauteous Cryptomeria — 
Helpless in Winter's clutch our Koelreuteria. 

We stood beneath our Ulmus Gracilis, 
And watched the tempest-torn Fitzroya, 
And shaken than the stout Sequoia; 

And yet I knew in spite of this, 

Your heart was hopeful of the Springtide's kiss. 

Yours was the faith of woman, dearest child. 

Your eyes — Centaurea Cyanus — 

Saw what I saw not nigh to us, 
And that, I knew, was why you smiled, 
When the Montana Pendula swung wild. 

I knew you smiled, thinking of suns to come, 
Seeing in snowflakes on bare trees 
Solanum Jasmmo'ides — 



262 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Seeing ere Winter's voice was dumb, 
The peeping pink Mesembrianthiwm. 

I knew you saw as if they flowered before us, 

The sweet Rhodora Canadensis, 

The lush Wistaria Sinensis, 
The Lepsosiphon Densiflorus — 
All flowers that swell the Summer's colour-chorus. 

And, lightened by your smile, I saw, my Alice, 
The modest Resida Odorata — 
Linaria Reticulata — 
I drank the sweets of Summer's chalice, 
Sparkling Calendula Officinalis. 

To me your smile brought sunshine that gray day, 

The saddest Salex Babylonica 

Became Anemone Japonica 
And the whole world beneath its ray, 
Bloomed one Escholtzia Calif ornicaz. 

Still in thy smile the summer airs caress us ; 
And now with thee my faith is sure : 
The love that binds us shall endure — 
Nay, growing day by day to bless us, 
Till o'er us waves Supervirens Cupressus. 

" I hope I haven't bored you, sir. I don't pretend 
to be a poet; but you see what my aim is, I'm sure — 
lucidity and accuracy — strict accuracy, sir. Some- 
thing that every one can understand." 

I assured him that he had convinced me that he 
understood his business: he was incomparable — as a 
florist. 



CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND 

Among the features of our gardens for which I am 
not responsible, is the grass walk alongside the Castle 
Wall, where it descends on one side, by the remains 
of the terraces of the Duke's hanging gardens, fifty- 
feet into the original fosse, while on the other it 
breasts the ancient Saxon earthwork, which reduces 
its height to something under fifteen, so that the wall 
on our side is quite a low one, but happily of a breadth 
that allows of a growth of wild things — lilacs and 
veronicas and the like — in beautiful luxuriance, while 
the face is in itself a garden of crevices where the 
wallflowers last long enough to mix with the snap- 
dragons and scores of modest hyssops and mosses and 
ferns that lurk in every cranny. 

Was it beneath such a wall that Tennyson stood to 
wonder how he should fulfil the commission he had 
received from Good Words — or was it Once a Week? 
— for any sort of poem that would serve as an adver- 
tisement of magazine enterprise, and he wrote that 
gem to which Mr. Gilbert had referred? — 

" Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies ; 

Hold you here, stem and all in my hand. 

Little flower; but if I could understand 
263 



264 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

What you are, stem and all and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 



I should like equal immortality to be conferred upon 
the parody which is of far greater merit than the 
original : — 

* Terrier in my granny's hall, 

I whistle you out of my granny's ; 
Hold you here, tail and all in my hand. 
Little terrier; but if I could understand 
What you are, tail and all and all in all, 

I should know what black-and-tan is." 

I could understand the inspiration that should re- 
sult in sermons from stones — such as the poet's for- 
getting that his mission was not that of the sermon- 
ising missionary, but of the singer of such creations 
of beauty as offer themselves to nestle to the heart of 
man — when walking round the gracious curve that 
the grass path makes till it is arrested by the break 
in the wall where the postern gate once hung, guarded 
by the sentinel whose feet must have paced this grass 
path until no blade of grass remained on it. 

Early every summer the glory of the snapdragons 
and the wallflowers is overwhelmed for a time by the 
blossom of the pear-trees and the plums which spread 
themselves abroad and sprawl even over the top of 
the wall. By their aid the place is transformed for 
a whole month in a fruitful year. In 1917 it was as 
if a terrific snowstorm had visited us. It was with us 
as with all our neighbours, a wonderful year for 



f^ 






» ■•V-'-- v**V'*» ■ 









L- 







A GARDEN OF PEACE 265 

pears, apples, and plums. Pink and white and white 
and pink hid the world and all that appertained to it 
from our eyes, and when the blossoms were shed we 
were afraid to set a foot upon the grass path : it would 
have been a profanity to crush that delicate em- 
broidery. It seemed as if Nature had flung down 
her copious mantle of fair white satin before our feet; 
but we bowed our heads conscious of our unworthiness 
and stood motionless in front of that exquisite car- 
peting. 

And then day after day the lovely things of the 
wall that had been hidden asserted themselves, and 
a soft wind swept the path till all the green of the 
new grass path flowed away at our feet, and Nature 
seemed less virginal. Then came the babes — revealed 
by the fallen blossoms — plump little cherubic faces of 
apples, graver little papooses of the russet Indian 
tint, which were pears, and smaller shy things peep- 
ing out from among the side shoots, which we could 
hardly recognise as plums; rather a carcanet of 
chrysoprase they seemed, so delicately green in their 
early days, before each of them became like the ripe 
Oriental beauty, the nigra sed formosa, of the Song 
of Solomon, and for the same reason : " Because the 
sun hath looked upon me," she cried. When the sun 
had looked upon the fruit that clustered round the 
clefts in our wall, he was as one of the sons of God 
who had become aware for the first time of the fact 
that the daughters of men were fair; and the whole 
aspect of the world was changed. 

Is there any part of a garden that is more beau- 



266 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

tiful than the orchard? At every season it is lovely. 
I cannot understand how it is that the place for fruit- 
growing is in so many gardens kept away from what 
is called the ornamental part. I cannot understand 
how it has come about that flowering shrubs are wel- 
comed and flowering apples discouraged in the most 
favoured situations. When a considerable number of 
the former have lost their blossoms, they are for the 
rest of the year as commonplace as is possible for a 
tree to be; but when the apple-blossom has gone, the 
boughs that were pink take on a new lease of beauty, 
and the mellow glory of the season of fruitage lasts 
for months. The berry of the gorse which is some- 
times called a gooseberry, is banished like a Northum- 
berland cow-pincher of the romantic period, beyond 
the border; but a well furnished gooseberry bush is 
as worthy of admiration as anything that grows in 
the best of the borders, whether the fruit is green or 
red. And then look at the fruit of the white currant 
if you give it a place where the sun can shine through 
it — clusters shining with the soft light of the Pleiades 
or the more diffuse Cassiopea; and the red currants 
— well, I suppose they are like clusters of rubies ; but 
everything that is red is said to be like a ruby; why 
not talk of the red currant bush as a firmament that 
holds a thousand round fragments of a fractured 
Mars? 

There was a time in England when a garden meant 
a place of fruit rather than flowers, but by some freak 
of fashion it was decreed that anything that appealed 
to the sense of taste was " not in good taste " — that 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 267 

was how the warrant for the banishment of so much 
beauty was worded — " not in good taste." I think 
that the decree is so closely in harmony with the other 
pronouncements of the era of mauvaise honte — the 
era of affectations — when the " young lady " was lan- 
guid and insipid — " of dwarf habit," as the catalogues 
describe such a growth, and was never allowed to be 
a girl — when fainting was esteemed one of the highest 
accomplishments of the sex, and everything that was 
natural was pronounced gross — when the sampler, 
the sandal, and the simper were the outward and 
visible signs of an inward and affected femininity: 
visible? oh, no; the sandal was supposed to be invisi- 
ble; if it once appeared even to the extent of a taper 
toe, and attention was called to its obtrusion, there 
was a little shriek of horror, and the " young lady " 
was looked at askance as demie-vierge. It was so 
much in keeping with the rest of the parcel to look 
on something that could be eaten as something 
too gross to be constantly in sight when growing 
naturally, that I think the banishment of the apple 
and the pear and the plum and the gooseberry to a 
distant part of the garden must be regarded as be- 
longing to the same period. But now that the in- 
delicacy of the super-delicacy of that era has passed 
— now that the shy sandal has given place to the well- 
developed calf above the " calf uppers " of utilitarian 
boots — now that a young man and a young woman 
(especially the young woman) discuss naturally the 
question of eugenics and marriage with that freedom 
which once was the sole prerogative of the prayer- 



268 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

book, may we not claim an enlargement of our bor- 
ders to allow of the rehabilitation of the apple and 
the repatriation of the pear in a part of the garden 
where all can enjoy their decorative qualities and 
anticipate their gastronomic without reproach? Let 
us give the fruit its desserts and it will return the 
compliment. 

The Saxon earthwork below the grass walk is given 
over to what is technically termed " the herbaceous 
border," and over one thousand eight hundred square 
feet there should be such a succession of flowers grow- 
ing just as they please, as should delight the heart of 
a democracy. The herbaceous border is the demo- 
cratic section of a garden. The autocrat of the 
Dutch and the Formal gardens is not allowed to carry 
out any of his foul designs of clipping or curtailing 
the freedom of Flora in this province. There should 
be no reminiscences of the tyrant stake which in far- 
distant days of autocracy was a barrier to the freedom 
of growth, nor should the aristocracy of the hot-house 
or even the cool greenhouse obtrude its educated 
bloom among the lovers of liberty. They must be 
allowed to do as they damplease, which is a good 
step beyond the ordinary doing as they please. The 
government of the herbaceous border is one whose 
aim is the glorification of the Mass as opposed to the 
Individual. 

It is not at all a bad principle — for a garden — this 
principle which can best be carried out by the unprin- 
cipled. English democracy includes princes and 
principles ; but there is a species which will have noth- 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 269 

ing to do with principles because they reckon them 
corrupted by their first syllable, and hold that the 
aristocrat is like Hamlet's stepfather, whose offence 
was "rank and smells to heaven." I have noticed, 
however, in the growth of my democratic border that 
there are invariably a few pushing and precipitate 
individuals who insist on having their own way — it is 
contrary to the spirit of Freedom to check them — and 
the result is that the harmony of the whole ceases to 
exist. But there are some people who would prefer 
a Bolshevist wilderness to any garden. 

I have had some experience of Herbaceous Bor- 
ders of mankind. . . . 

The beauty of the border is to be found in the 
masses, we are told in the Guides to Gardening. We 
should not allow the blues to mix with the buffs, and 
the orange element should not assert its ascendancy 
over the green. But what is the use of laying down 
hard and fast rules here when the essence of the con- 
stitution of the system is No Rule. My experience 
leads me to believe that without a rule of life and a 
firm ruler, this portion of the garden will become 
in the course of time allied to the prairie or the wilder- 
ness, and the hue that will prevail to the destruction 
of any governing scheme of colour or colourable 
scheme of government will be Red. 

Which things are an allegory, culled from a garden 
of herbs, which, as we have been told, will furnish a 
dinner preferable to one that has for its piece de resist- 
ance the stalled ox, providing that it is partaken of 
under certain conditions rigidly defined. 



270 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

We have never been able to bring our herbaceous 
border to the point of perfection which we are assured 
by some of those optimists who compile nurserymen's 
catalogues, it should reach. We have massed our 
colours and nailed them to the mast, so to speak — 
that is, we have not surrendered our colour schemes 
because we happen to fall short of victory ; but still we 
must acknowledge that the whole border has never 
been the success that we hoped it would be. Perhaps 
we have been too exacting — expecting over much; or 
it may be that our standard was too Royal a one for 
the soil; but the facts remain and we have a sense of 
disappointment. 

It seems to me that this very popular feature de- 
pends too greatly upon the character of the season to 
be truly successful as regards ensemble. Our border 
includes many subjects which have ideas of their own 
as regards the weather. A dry spring season may 
stunt (in its English sense) the growth of some 
flowers that occupy a considerable space, and are 
meant to play an important part in the design; 
whereas the same influence may develop a stunt (in 
the American sense) in a number of others, thereby 
bringing about a dislocation of the whole scheme. 
Then some things will rush ahead and override their 
neighbours — some that lasted in good condition up to 
the October of one year look shabby before the end 
of July the next. One season differs from another 
on vital points and the herbs differ in their growth 
— I had almost written their habit — in accordance 
with the differences of the season. We have had a 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 271 

fine show in one place and a shabby show next door; 
we have had a splendid iris season and a wretched 
peony season — bare patches beside luxuriant patches. 
The gailardias have broken out of bounds one sum- 
mer, and when we left " ample verge and room 
enough " for them the next, they turned sulky, and 
the result was a wide space of soil on which a score 
of those gamins of the garden, chickweed and dande- 
lion, promptly began operations, backed up by those 
apaches of a civilised borderland, the ragged robin, 
and we had to be strenuous in our surveillance of the 
place, fearful that a riot might ruin all that we had 
taken pains to bring to perfection. So it has been 
season after season — one part quite beautiful, a sec- 
ond only middling, and a third utterly unresponsive. 
That is why we have taken to calling it the facetious 
border. 

Our experience leads us to look on this facetious 
herbaceous border as the parson's daughter looks on 
the Sunday School — as a place for the development of 
all that is tricky in Nature, with here and there a 
bunch of clean collars and tidy trimmings — some- 
thing worth carrying on over, but not to wax en- 
thusiastic over. So we mean to carry on, and take 
Flora's " buffets and awards " " with equal thanks." 
We shall endeavour to make our unruly tract in some 
measure tractable; and, after all, where is the joy of 
gardening apart from the trying? It was a great 
philosopher who affirmed at the close of a long life, 
that if he were starting his career anew and the choice 
were offered to him between the Truth and the Pur- 



272 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

suit of Truth, he would certainly choose the latter. 
That man had the true gardening spirit. 

Any one who enters a garden without feeling that 
he is entering a big household of children, should stay 
outside and make a friend of the angel who was set 
at the gate of the first Paradise with a flaming sword, 
which I take it was a gladiolus — the gladiolus is the 
gladius of flowerland — to keep fools on the outside. 
The angel and the proper man will get on very well 
together at the garden gate, talking of things that are 
within the scope of the intelligence of angels and men 
who think doormats represent Nature in that they are 
made of cocoa-nut fibre. We have long ago come to 
look on the garden as a region of living things — 
shouting children, riotous children, sulky children; 
children who are rebellious, perverse, impatient at re- 
striction, bad-tempered, quarrelsome, but ever ready 
to " make it up," and fling themselves into your arms 
and give you a chance of sharing with them the true 
joy of life which is theirs. 

This is what a garden of flowers means to any one 
who enters it in a proper spirit of comradeship, and 
not in the attitude of a School Inspector. We go 
into the garden not to educate the flowers, but to be 
beloved by them — to make companions of them and, 
if they will allow us, to share some of the secrets they 
guard so jealously until they find some one whom they 
feel they can trust implicitly. A garden is like the 
object of Dryden's satire, " Not one, but all man- 
kind's epitome," and a knowledge of men that makes 
a man a sympathetic gardener. I think that Christ 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 273 

was as fond of gardens as God ever was. " Consider 
the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not 
neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one 
of these." 

There is the glorious charter of the garden, the 
truth of which none can dispute — there is the revela- 
tion of the spirit of the garden delivered to men by the 
wisest and the most sympathetic garden-lover that 
ever sought a Gethsemane for communion with the 
Father of all, in an hour of trial. 

I wonder what stores of knowledge of plant-life 
existed among the wise Orientals long ago. Were 
they aware of all that we suppose has only been re- 
vealed to us — " discovered " by us within recent 
years? Did they know that there is no dividing line 
between the various elements of life — between man, 
who is the head of " the brute creation," and the crea- 
tures of what the books of my young days styled " the 
Vegetable Kingdom"? Did they know that it is 
possible for a tree to have a deeper love for its mate 
than a man has for the wife whom he cherishes? I 
made the acquaintance some years ago of an Eastern 
tree which was brought away from his family in the 
forest and, though placed in congenial soil, remained 
for years making no advance in growth — living, but 
nothing more — until one day a thoughtful man who 
had spent years studying plants of the East, brought 
a female companion to that tree, and had the satis- 
faction of seeing " him " assume a growth which was 
maintained year by year alongside " her," until they 



274 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

were both shown to me rejoicing together, the one 
vieing with the other in luxuriance of foliage and 
fruit. Every one who has grown apples or plums 
has had the same experience. We all know now of 
the courtship and the love and the marriage of things 
in " the Vegetable Kingdom," and we know that there 
is no difference in the process of that love which means 
life in " the Animal Kingdom " and " the Vegetable 
Kingdom." In some directions their " human " feel- 
ings and emotions and passions have been made plain 
to us; how much more we shall learn it is impossible 
to tell ; but we know enough to save us from the error 
of fancying that they have a different existence from 
ours, and every day that one spends in a garden makes 
us ready to echo Shelley's lyrical shout of " Beloved 
Brotherhood!" 

That is what I feel when I am made the victim of 
some of the pranks of the gay creatures of the her- 
baceous border, who amuse themselves at our expense, 
refusing to be bound down to our restrictions, to 
travel the way we think good plants should go, and 
declining to be guided by an intelligence which they 
know to be inferior to their own. The story of the 
wilful gourd which would insist on crossing a garden 
path in the direction it knew to be the right one, 
though a human intelligence tried to make it go in 
another, was told by an astonished naturalist in the 
pages of Country Life a short time ago. I hope it 
was widely read. The knowledge that such things 
can be will give many thousand readers access to a 
field of study and of that legitimate speculation which 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 275 

is the result of study and observation. It will ever 
tend to mitigate the disappointment some of us may 
be inclined to harbour when we witness our floral 
failures, though it is questionable if the recognition 
of the fact that our failures are due to our own stupid 
bungling, will diminish the store of that self-conceit 
which long ago induced us to think of ourselves as the 
sole raison d'etre of all Creation. 



CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD 

We were working at the young campanulas when our 
friend Heywood came upon us — Heywood, for whose 
intelligence we have so great a respect, because he so 
frequently agrees with our outlook upon the world of 
woman and other flowers cherished by us. Heywood 
is a good artist ; but because he believes that Woman- 
kind is a kind woman indefinitely multiplied, he paints 
more faithful portraits of men than of women ; he also 
paints landscapes that live more faithfully than the 
human features that he depicts and receives large 
sums for depicting. He is a student of children, and 
comes to Rosamund quite seriously for her criticism. 
She gives it unaffectedly, I am glad to notice; and 
without having to make use of a word of the School- 
of-Art phraseology. 

We have an able surgeon (retired) living close to 
us here, and he is still so interested in the Science he 
practised — he retired from the practice, not from the 
science — that when he is made aware of an unusual 
operation about to be performed in any direction — 
London, Paris, or (not recently) Vienna, he goes off 
to witness the performance, just as we go to some of 
the most interesting premieres in town. In the same 
spirit Heywood runs off every now and again to Paris 

276 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 277 

to see the latest production of his old master, or the 
acquisition of an old Master at one of the galleries. 
It lets him know what is going on in the world, he 
says, and I am sure he is quite right. 

But, of course, Atheist Friswell has his smile — a 
solemn smile it is this time — while he says, — 

" Old Masters? Young mississes rather, I think." 

" Young what? " cried Dorothy. 

" Mysteries," he replied. " What on earth do you 
think I said?" 

" Another word with the same meaning," says she. 

But these artistic excursions have nothing to do 
with us among our campanulas to-day. Heywood has 
been aware of a funny thing and came to make us 
laugh with him. 

" Campanulas! " he cried. " And that is just what 
I came to tell you about — the campanile at St. Kath- 
erine's." 

Yardley Parva, in common with Venice, Florence, 
and a number of other places, has a campanile, only 
it was not designed by Giotto or any other artist. 
Nor is it even called a campanile, but a bell-tower, 
and it belongs to the Church of St. Katherine-sub- 
Castro — a Norman church transformed by a few 
adroit touches here and there into the purest Gothic 
of the Restoration — the Gilbert Scott-Church-Resto- 
ration period. 

But no one would complain with any measure of 
bitterness at the existence of the bell-tower only for 
the fact that there are bells within it, and these bells 
being eight, lend themselves to many feats of cam- 



278 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

panology, worrying the inhabitants within a large 
area round about the low levels of the town. The 
peace of every Sabbath Day is rudely broken by the 
violence of what the patient folk with no arriere 
pensee term " them joy bells." 

" You have not heard a sound of them for some 
Sundays," said Heywood. 

" I have not complained," said I. " Ask Dorothy 
if I have." 

" No one has, unless the bell-ringers, who are get- 
ting flabby through lack of exercise," said he. " But 
the reason you have not heard them is because they 
have been silent." 

" ' The British Fleet you cannot see, for it is not in 
sight,' " said I. 

" And the reason that they have been silent was the 
serious illness of Mr. Livesay, whose house is close to 
St. Katherine's. Dr. Beecher prescribed complete 
repose for poor Livesay, and as the joy bells of St. 
Katherine's do not promote that condition, his wife 
sent a message to the ringers asking them to oblige 
by refraining from their customary uproar until 
the doctor should remove his ban. They did so two 
Sundays ago, and the Sunday before last they sent 
to inquire how the man was. He was a good deal 
worse, they were told, so they were cheated out of 
their exercise again. Yesterday, however, they rang 
merrily out — merrily." 

" We heard," said Dorothy. " So I suppose Mr. 
Livesay is better." 

" On the contrary, he is dead," said Heywood. 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 279 

" He died late on Saturday night. My housekeeper, 
Mrs. Hartwell, had just brought me in my breakfast 
when the bells began. ' Listen,' she cried. ' Listen! 
the joy bells! Mr. Livesay must have died last 
night.' " 

It was true. The bell-ringers had made their call 
at poor Livesay's house on Sunday morning, and on 
receiving the melancholy news, they hurried off to let 
their joy bells proclaim it far and wide. 

But no one in Yardley Parva, lay or clerical, except 
Heywood and ourselves seemed to think that there 
was anything singular in the incident. 

We had a few words to say, however, about joy 
bells spreading abroad the sad news of a decent man's 
death, and upon campanology in general. 

But when Friswell heard of the affair, he said he 
did not think it more foolish than the usual practice 
of church bells. 

" We all know, of course, that there is nothing 
frightens the devil like the ringing of bells," said he. 

" That is quite plausible," said I. " Any one who 
doubts it must have lived all his life in a heathen 
place where there are no churches. Juan Fernandez, 
for example," I added, as a couple of lines sang 
through my recollection. " Cowper made his Alex- 
ander Selkirk long for ' the sound of the church- 
going bell.' " 

" That was a good touch of Cowper's," said Fris- 
well. " He knew that Alexander Selkirk was a Scots- 
man, and with much of the traditional sanctimonious- 
ness of his people, when he found himself awfu' bad 



280 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

or muckle bad or whatever the right phrase is, he was 
ready to propitiate heaven by a pious aspiration." 

" Nothing of the sort," cried Dorothy. " He was 
quite sincere. Cowper knew that there is nothing that 
brings back recollections of childhood, which we 
always think was the happiest time of our life, like the 
chiming of church bells." 

" I dare say you are right," said he, after a little 
pause. " But like many other people, poet Cowper 
did not think of the church bells except in regard to 
their secondary function of summoning people to the 
sacred precincts. He probably never knew that the 
original use of the bells was to scare away the Evil 
One. It was only when they found out that he had 
never any temptation to enter a church, that the 
authorities turned their devil-scaring bells to the sum- 
moning of the worshippers, and they have kept up 
the foolish practice ever since." 

" Why foolish? " asked Dorothy quite affably. 
" You don't consider it foolish to ring a bell to go to 
dinner, and why should you think it so in the matter 
of going to church? " 

" My dear creature, you don't keep ringing your 
dinner bell for half an hour, with an extra five min- 
utes for the cook." 

" No," said she quickly. " And why not? Because 
people don't need any urging to come to dinner, but 
they require a good deal to go to church, and then 
they don't go." 

" There's something in that," said he. " Anyhow 
they've been ringing those summoning bells so long 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 281 

that I'm sure they will go on with them until all 
the churches are turned into school-houses." 

" And then there will be a passing-bell rung for 
the passing of the churches themselves — I suppose the 
origin of the passing-bell was the necessity to scare 
away the devil at the supreme moment," remarked 
Hey wood. 

" Undoubtedly it was," said Friswell. " The prac- 
tice exists among many of those races that are still 
savage enough to believe in the devil — a good hand- 
made tom-tom does the business quite effectually, 
I've heard." 

" Do you know, my dear Friswell, I think that 
when you sit down with us in our Garden of Peace, 
the conversation usually takes the form of the dia- 
logue in Magnall's Questions or the Child's Guide 
or Joyce's Science. You are so full of promiscuous 
information which you cannot hide? " 

He roared in laughter, and we all joined in. 
' You have just said what my wife says to me 
daily," said he. " I'll try to repress myself in 
future." 

" Don't try to do anything of the sort," cried Doro- 
thy. " You never cease to be interesting, no matter 
how erudite you are." 

" What I can't understand is, how he has escaped 
assassination all these years," remarked Heywood. 
" I think the time is coming when whoso slayeth Fris- 
well will think that he doeth God's service. Just 
think all of you of the mental state of the man who 
fails to see that, however heathenish may be the prac- 



282 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

tice of church-bell-ringing, the fact that it has 
brought into existence some of the most beautiful 
buildings in the world makes the world its debtor for 
evermore ! " 

" I take back all my words — I renounce the devil 
and all his work," cried the other man. " Yes, I hold 
that Giotto's Campanile justifies all the clashing and 
banging and hammering before and since. On the 
same analogy I believe with equal sincerity that the 
Temple of Jupiter fully justifies the oblations to the 
Father of gods, and the Mosque of Omar the mas- 
sacres of Islam." 

" Go on," said Dorothy. " Say that the sufferings 
of Alexander Selkirk were justified since without 
them we should not have Robinson Crusoe/' 

" I will say anything you please, my Lady of the 
Garden," said he heartily. " I will say that the beauty 
of that border beside you justifies Wakeley's lavish 
advertisements of Hop Mixture." 

I felt that this sort of thing had gone on long 
enough, so I made a hair-pin bend in the conversation 
by asking Dorothy if she remembered the day of our 
visit to Robinson Crusoe's island. 

" I never knew that you had been to Juan Fer- 
nandez," said Friswell. 

And then I saw how I could score off Friswell. 

" I said Robinson Crusoe's island, not Alexander 
Selkirk's," I cried. " Alexander Selkirk's was Juan 
Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's was Tobago in the 
West Indies, which Dorothy and I explored some 
years ago." 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 283 

" Of course I should have remembered that," said 
he. " I recollect now what a stumbling-block to me 
the geography of Robinson Crusoe was when I first 
read the book. A foolish explanatory preface to the 
cheap copy I read gave a garbled version of the story 
of Selkirk and his island, and said no word about 
Daniel Defoe having been wise enough to change 
Juan Fernandez for another." 

' You were no worse than the writer of a para- 
graph I read in one of the leading papers a short 
time ago, relative to the sale of the will which Selkirk 
made in the year 1717 — years after Captain Woodes 
Rodgers had picked him up at the island where he 
had been marooned nearly four years before," said 
Dorothy, who, I remembered, had laughed over the 
erudition of the paragraph. " The writer affirmed 
that the will had been made before the man ' had 
sailed unwittingly for Tristan d'Acunha ' — those 
were his exact words, and this island he seemed to 
identify with Bishop Heber's, for he said it was 
' where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.' 
What was in the poor man's mind was the fact that 
some one had written a poem about Alexander Sel- 
kirk, and he mixed Cowper up with Heber." 

" You didn't write to the paper to put the fellow 
right," said Heywood. 

" Good gracious, no ! " cried Dorothy. " I knew 
that no one in these aeroplaning days would care 
whether the island was Tristan d'Acunha or Juan 
Fernandez. Besides, there was too much astray in 
the paragraph for a simple woman to set about mak- 



284 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

ing good. Anyhow the document fetched £60 at the 
sale." 

" You remember the lesson that was learnt by the 
man who wrote to correct something a newspaper 
had written about him," said Heywood. ' The 
editor called me a swindler, a liar, and a politician,' 
said he, relating his experience, ' and like a fool I 
wrote to contradict it. I was a fool: for what did 
the fellow do in the very next issue but prove every 
statement that he had made! ' " 

" Oh, isn't it lucky that I didn't write to that 
paper? " cried Dorothy. 

But when we began to talk of the imaginary suf- 
ferings of Robinson Crusoe, and to try to imagine 
what were the real sufferings of Selkirk, Friswell 
laughed, saying, — 

" I'm pretty sure that what the bonnie Scots body 
suffered from most poignantly was the island not hav- 
ing any of his countrymen at hand, so that they could 
start a Burns Club or a Caledonian Society, as the 
six representatives of Scotland are about to do in our 
town of Yardley, which has hitherto been free from 
anything of that sort. Did you ever hear the story 
of Andrew Gareloch and Alec MacClackan? " 

We assured him that we had never heard a word 
of it. 

He told it to us, and this is what it amounted to : — 

Messrs. Andrew Gareloch and Alec MacClackan 
were merchants of Shanghai who were unfortunate 
enough to be wrecked on their voyage home. They 
were the sole survivors of the ship's company, and 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 285 

the desert island on which they found themselves was 
in the Pacific, only a few miles in circumference. 
In the lagoon were plenty of fish and on the ridge of 
the slope were plenty of cocoa-nuts. After a good 
meal they determined to name the place. They called 
it St. Andrew Lang Syne Island, and became as fes- 
tive and brotherly — they pronounced it " britherly " 
— as was possible over cocoa-nut milk: it was a long 
time since either of them had tasted milk of any sort. 
The second day they founded a local Benevolent So- 
ciety of St. Andrew, and held the inaugural dinner; 
the third day they founded a Burns Club, with a 
supper; the fourth day they starts a Scots Associa- 
tion, with a series of monthly reunions for the dis- 
cussion of the Minstrelsy of the Border; the fifth day 
they laid out golf links with the finest bunkers in 
the world, and instituted a club lunch (strictly non- 
alcoholic) ; the sixth day they formed a Curling Club 
— the lagoon would make a braw rink, they said, if 
it only froze ; and if it didn't freeze, well, they could 
still have an annual Curlers' Supper; the Seventh 
Day they kept. On the evening of the same day a 
vessel was sighted bearing up for the island; but of 
course neither of the men would hoist a signal on the 
Seventh Day, and they watched the craft run past 
the island; though they were amazed to see that she 
had only courses and a foresail set, in spite of the fact 
that the breeze was a light one. The next morning, 
when they were sitting at breakfast, discussing 
whether they should lay the foundation stone — with 
a commemorative lunch — of a Free Kirk, a Wee Free 



286 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Kirk, a U.P. meeting-house or an Ould Licht meet- 
ing-house — they had been fiercely debating on the 
merits of each during the previous twenty years — 
they saw the vessel returning with all sail on her. To 
run up one of their shirts to a pole at the entrance 
to the lagoon was a matter of a moment, and they 
saw that their signal was responded to. She was 
steered by their signals through the entrance to the 
lagoon and dropped anchor. 

She turned out to be the Bonnie Doon, of Dundee, 
Douglas MacKellar, Master. He had found wreck- 
age out at sea and had thought it possible that some 
survivors of the wreck might want passages " hame." 

" Nae, nae," cried both men. " We're no in need o' 
passages hame just the noo. But what for did ye no 
mak' for the lagoon yestreen in the gloamin' ? " 

" Hoot awa' — hoot awa' ! ye wouldna hae me come 
ashore on the Sawbath Day," said Captain Mac- 
Kellar. 

" Ye shortened sail though," said Mr. MacClackan. 

"Ay; on Saturday nicht: I never let her do more 
than just sail on the Sawbath. But what for did ye 
no run up a signal, ye loons, if ye spied me sae weel? " 

" Hoot awa' — hoot awa', man, ye wouldna hae a 
body mak' a signal on the Sawbath Day." 

" Na — na; no a reg'lar signal; but ye micht hae run 
up a wee bittie — just eneuch tae catch me e'en on. 
Ay an' mebbe ye'll be steppin' aboard the noo? " 

" We'll hae to hae a clash about it, Captain." 

Well, they talked it over cautiously for a few 
hours; for Captain MacKellar was a hard man at a 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 287 

bargain, and he would not agree to give them a pass- 
age under two pound a head. At last, however, nego- 
tiations were concluded, the men got aboard the 
Bonnie Doon } and piloted her through the channel. 
They reached the Clyde in safety, and Captain Mac- 
Kellar remarked, — 

" Weel, ma freens, I'm in hopes that ye'll pay me 
ower the siller this day." 

" Ay, ye maun be in the quare swithers till ye see 
the siller; but we'll hand it ower, certes," said the 
passengers. " In the meantime, we'd tak' the leeberty 
o' callin' your attention to a wee bit contra-claim that 
we hae japped doon on a bit slip o' paper. It's three 
poon nine for Harbour Dues that ye owe us, Captain 
MacKellar, and twa poon ten for pilotage — it's com- 
pulsory at yon island, so 'tis, so mebbe ye'll mak' it 
convenient to hand us ower the differs when we land. 
Ay, Douglas MacKellar, ma mon, ye shouldna try 
to get the better o' Brither-Scots ! " 

Captain MacKellar was a God-fearing man, but he 
said, "Dom!" 



CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH 

Whatever my garden may be, I think I can honestly 
claim for it that it has no educational value. The 
educational garden is one in which all the different 
orders and classes and groups and species and genera 
are displayed in such a way as to make no display, 
but to enable an ordinary person in the course of ten 
or twelve years to become a botanist. Botany is the 
syntax of the garden. A man may know everything 
about syntax and yet never become a poet; and a 
garden should be a poem. 

I remember how a perfect poem of a garden was 
translated into the most repulsively correct prose by 
the exertions of a botanist. It was in a semi-public 
pleasure ground maintained by subscribers of a guinea 
each, and of course it was administered by a Commit- 
tee. After many years of failure, an admirable head- 
gardener was found — a young and enthusiastic man 
with an eye for design and an appreciation of form as 
well as colour. Within a short space of time he turned 
a commonplace pleasure-ground into a thing of beauty ; 
and, not content with making the enormous domed 
conservatory and the adjoining hothouse a blaze of 
colour and fragrance, he attacked an old worn-out 
greenhouse and, without asking for outside assistance, 

288 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 289 

transformed it into a natural sub-tropical landscape 
— palms and cacti and giant New Zealand ferns, 
growing amid rocky surroundings, and wonderful 
lilies filling a large natural basin, below an effective 
cascade. The place was just what such a place should 
be, conveying the best idea possible to have of a moist 
corner of a tropical forest, only without the over- 
whelming shabbiness which was the most striking note 
of every tropical forest I have ever seen in a natural 
condition. In addition to its attractiveness in this 
respect, it would have become a source of financial 
profit to the subscribers, for the annual " thinning 
out " of its superfluous growths would mean the 
stocking of many private conservatories. 

On the Committee of Management, however, there 
was one gentleman whose aim in life was to be re- 
garded by his fellow-tradesmen as a great botanist: 
he was, to a great botanist, what the writer of the 
cracker mottoes is to a great poet, or the compiler of 
the puzzle-page of a newspaper is to a great mathe- 
matician; but he was capable of making a fuss and 
convincing a bunch of tradesmen that making a fuss 
is a proof of superiority ; and that botany and beauty 
are never to be found in association. He condemned 
the tropical garden as an abomination, because it was 
impossible that a place which could give hospitality 
to a growth of New Zealand fern (Phormium 
Hookeri) , should harbour a sago palm ( Metroocylon 
Elatum ) , which was not indigenous to New Zealand ; 
and then he went on to talk about the obligations of 
the place to be educational and not ornamental, show- 



290 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

ing quite plainly that to be botanical should be the 
highest aim of any one anxious for the welfare of his 
country. 

The result of his harangue was the summoning of 
the head-gardener before the Board and his condem- 
nation on the ground that he had put the Beautiful 
in the place that should be occupied by the Educa- 
tional. He was ordered to abandon that unauthorised 
hobby of his for gratifying the senses of foolish people 
who did not know the difference between Phormiwm 
Hookeri and Metroxylon Elatum, and to set to work 
to lay out an Educational Garden. 

He looked at the members of the Board, and, like 
the poker player who said, " I pass," when he heard 
who had dealt the cards, he made no attempt to de- 
fend himself. He laid out the Educational Garden 
that was required of him, and when he had done so 
and the Board thought that he was resigned to his 
fate as the interpreter of the rules of prosody as ap- 
plied to a garden, he handed in his resignation, and 
informed them that he had accepted a situation as 
Curator of a park in a rival town, and at a salary — 
a Curator gets a salary and a gardener only wages — 
of exactly double the sum granted to him by the 
employers from whom he was separating himself. 

In three years the place he left had become bank- 
rupt and was wound up. It was bought at a " scrap- 
ping " figure by the Municipality, and its swings are 
now said to be the highest in five counties. 

I saw the Educational Garden that he laid out, and 
I knew, and so did he, that he was " laying out " — the 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 291 

undertaker's phrase — the whole concern. When he 
had completed it, I felt that I could easily resist the 
temptation to introduce education at the expense of 
design into any garden of mine. 

It is undeniable that a place constructed on such a 
botanical system may be extremely interesting to a 
number of students, and especially so to druggists' 
apprentices; but turning to so-called "educational 
purposes " a piece of garden that can grow roses, is 
like using the silk of an embroiderer to darn the cor- 
duroys of a railway porter. 

But it was a revelation to some people how the 
growing of war-time vegetables where only flowers 
had previously been grown, was not out of harmony 
with the design of a garden. I must confess that it 
was with some misgiving that I planted rows of run- 
ner beans in a long wall border which had formerly 
been given over to annuals, and globe artichokes 
where lilies did once inhabit — I even went so far as to 
sow carrots in lines between the echeverias of the 
stone-edged beds, and lettuces at the back of my 
fuchsia bushes. But the result from an aesthetic 
standpoint was so gratifying that I have not ceased 
to wonder why such beautiful things should be treated 
as were the fruit-trees, and looked on as steerage pas- 
sengers are by the occupants of the fifty-guinea state- 
rooms of a fashionable Cunarder. The artichoke is 
really a garden inmate; alongside the potatoes in the 
kitchen garden, it is like the noble Sir Pelleas who 
was scullery-maid in King Arthur's household. The 
globe artichoke is like one of those British peers whom 



292 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

we hear of — usually when they have just died — as 
serving in the forecastle of a collier tramp. It is a 
lordly thing, and, I have found, it makes many of the 
most uppish forms in the flower garden hide dimin- 
ished heads. An edging of dwarf cabbages of some 
varieties is quite as effective as one of box, and Dell's 
" black beet " cannot be beaten where a foliage effect 
is desired. Of course the runner bean must be accepted 
as a flower. If it has been excluded from its rightful 
quarters, it is because the idea is prevalent that it 
cannot be grown unless in the unsightly way that finds 
favour in the kitchen garden. It would seem as if the 
controllers of this department aimed at achieving the 
ugly in this particular. They make a sort of gipsy 
tripod of boughs, only without removing the twigs, 
and let the plant work its way up many of these. 
This is not good enough for a garden where neatness 
is regarded as a virtue. 

I found that these beans can be grown with abun- 
dant success in a border, by running a stout wire 
along brackets, two or three feet out from a wall, and 
suspending the roughest manila twine at intervals to 
carnation wires in the soil below. This gives an un- 
obtrusive support to the plants, and in a fortnight the 
whole of this flimsy frontage is hidden, and the blos- 
soms are blazing splendidly. I have had rows of over 
a hundred feet of these beans, but not one support 
gave way even in the strongest wind, and the house- 
hold was supplied up to the middle of November. 

I am sure that such experiments add greatly to the 
interest of gardening; and I encourage my Olive 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 293 

branch in her craving after a flower garden that shall 
be made up wholly of weeds. She has found out, I 
cannot say how, that the dandelion is a thing of beauty 
— she discovered one in a garden that she visited, and 
having never seen one before, inquired what was its 
name. I told her that the flower was not absolutely 
new to me, but lest I should lead her astray as to its 
name, she would do well to put her inquiry to the 
gardener and ask him for any hints he could give her 
as to its culture, and above all, how to propagate it 
freely. If he advised cuttings and a hot bed, perhaps 
he might be able to tell her the right temperature, and 
if he thought ordinary bonemeal would do for a fer- 
tiliser for it. 

Beyond a doubt a bed of dandelions would look 
very fine, but one cannot have everything in a garden, 
and I hope I may have the chance, hitherto denied 
to me, of resigning myself to its absence from mine, 
even though it be only for a single week. 

But there are many worthy weeds to be found when 
one looks carefully for them, and I should regard 
with great interest any display of them in a bed ( in a 
neighbour's garden, providing that that garden was 
not within a mile of mine). 

The transformation just mentioned of a decrepit 
greenhouse into the sub-tropical pleasure-ground, was 
not my inspiration for my treatment of a greenhouse 
which encumbered a part of my ground only a short 
time ago. It was a necessity for a practice of rigid 
economy that inspired me when I examined the dilapi- 
dations and estimated the cost of " making good " at 



294 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

something little short of fifty pounds. It had been 
patched often enough before, goodness knows, and its 
wounds had been poulticed with putty until in some 
places it seemed to be suffering from an irrepressible 
attack of mumps. 

Now the building had always been an offence to 
me. It was like an incompetent servant, who, in ad- 
dition to being incapable of earning his wages, is pos- 
sessed of an enormous appetite. With an old-fash- 
ioned heating apparatus the amount of fuel it con- 
sumed year by year was appalling; and withal it had 
more than once played us false, with the result that 
several precious lives were lost in a winter when we 
looked to the greenhouse to give us some colour for 
indoors. With such a list of convictions against it, I 
was not disposed to be lenient, and the suggestion of 
the discipline of a Reformatory was coldly received 
by me. 

The fact was, that in my position as judge, I re- 
sembled too closely the one in Gilbert's Trial by Jury 
to allow of my being trusted implicitly in cases in 
which personal attractions are to be put in the scales 
of even-handed Justice; and with all its burden of 
guilt that greenhouse bore the reputation of unsight- 
liness. If it had had a single redeeming feature, I 
might have been susceptible to its influence; but it 
had none. It had been born commonplace, and old 
age had not improved it. 

Leaning against the uttermost boundary wall of 
the garden, it had been my achievement to hide it 
by the hedge of briar roses and the colonnade; but 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 295 

it was sometimes only with great difficulty that we 
could head off visitors from its doors. Heywood 
heaped on it his concentrated opprobrium by calling 
it the Crystal Palace; but Dorothy, who had been a 
student of Jane Eyre, had given it the name of 
" Rochester's Wife," and we had behaved toward it 
pretty much as Jane's lover had behaved in his en- 
deavour to set up a younger and more presentable 
object in the place of his mature demented partner: 
we had two other glass-houses that we could enter and 
see entered without misgiving; so that when we stood 
beside the offending one with the estimate of the cost 
of its reformation, I, at any rate, was not disposed to 
leniency. 

" A case for the Reformatory," said Dorothy, and 
in a moment the word brought to my mind the advice 
of the young lord Hamlet, and I called out, — 

" Reform it altogether." 

"What do you mean?" she asked; for she some- 
times gives me credit for uttering words with a mean- 
ing hidden somewhere among the meshes of verbiage. 

" I have spoken the decision of the Court," I re- 
plied. " ' Reform it altogether.' " 

" At a cost — a waste — of sixty odd pounds? " 

" I will not try to renew its youth like the eagles," 
said I, in the tone of voice of a prophet in the act of 
seeing a vision. " I shall make a new thing of it, and 
a thing of beauty into the bargain." 

She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days 
Sarai laughed at the forecast of an equally unlikely 
occurrence. 



296 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

After an interval she laughed again, but with no 
note of derision. 

" I see it all now — all! " she cried. " You will be 
the Martin Luther of its Reformation: you will cut 
the half of it away; but will the Church stand when 
you have done with it? " 

" Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice 
of no protestant against it," I replied. 

My scheme had become apparent to her in almost 
every particular as it had flashed upon me; and we 
began operations the very next day. 

And this is what the operation amounted to — an 
Amputation. 

When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make 
its recovery hopeless as well as a danger to the whole 
body, the saving grace of the surgeon's knife is re- 
sorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the 
patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten 
parts of the roof of the greenhouse and convert the 
remainder, which was perfectly sound, into a peach- 
shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation 
had been performed with what appeared to us to be 
complete success. 

We removed the lower panes of glass without diffi- 
culty — the difficulty was to induce the others to re- 
main under their bondage of ancient putty: "They 
don't make putty like that nowadays," remarked my 
builder, who is also, in accordance with the dictation 
of a job like this, a housebreaker, a carpenter, and a 
glazier — a sort of unity of many tools that comes to 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 297 

our relief (very appropriately) from the United 
States. 

I replied to him enigmatically that putty was a 
very good servant, but a very bad master. The dic- 
tum had no connection with the matter in hand, but 
it sounded as if it had, and that it was the crystallisa- 
tion of wisdom; and the good workman accepted it 
at its face value. He removed over two hundred 
panes, each four feet by ten inches, without breaking 
one, and he removed more than a thousand feet of the 
two-inch laths from the stages, the heavier ones being 
of oak; he braced up the seven foot depth of roof 
which we decreed should shelter our peaches, and 
" made good " the inequalities of the edges. In short, 
he made a thoroughly good job of the affair, and 
when he had finished he left us with a new and very 
interesting feature of the garden. A lean-to green- 
house is, as a rule, a commonplace incident in a garden 
landscape, and it is doubtful if it pays for its keep, 
though admittedly useful as a nursery; but a peach- 
alley is interesting because unusual. In our place of 
peace this element is emphasised through our having 
allowed the elevated, brick-built border that existed 
before, to remain untouched, and also the framework 
where the swing-glass ventilators had been hung. 
When our peach-trees were planted, flanked by plums 
and faced by apples en espalier, we covered the 
borders with violas of various colours, and enwreathed 
the framework with the Cape Plumbago and the Jas- 
mine Solanum, and both responded nobly to our de- 
mands. 



298 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

Nothing remained in order to place the transforma- 
tion in harmony with its surroundings but to turn the 
two large brick tanks which had served us well in 
receiving the water from the old roof, into ornamental 
lily ponds, and this was accomplished by the aid of 
some of the stone carvings which I had picked up 
from time to time, in view of being able to give them 
a place of honour some day. On the whole, we are 
quite satisfied with this additional feature. It creates 
another surprise for the entertainment of a visitor, 
and when the peaches and plums ripen simultaneously, 
following the strawberries, we shall have, if we are to 
believe Friswell, many more friends coming to us. 

" If they are truly friends, we shall be glad," says 
Dorothy. 

" By your fruits ye shall know them," says he, for 
like most professors of the creed of the incredulous, 
he is never so much at his ease as when quoting Scrip- 
Jure. 

This morning as I was playing (indifferently) the 
part of Preceptress Pinkerton, trying to induce on 
Rosamund, Olive, Francie, Marjorie, and our dear, 
wise John, a firm grasp of the elements of the nature 
of the English People as shown by their response to 
the many crusades in which they have taken part 
since the first was proclaimed by Peter the Hermit, 
I came to that part of my illuminating discourse 
which referred to the Nation's stolidity even in their 
hour of supreme triumph. 

" This," said I, " may be regarded by the more 



A GARDEN OF PEACE 299 

emotional peoples of Europe as showing a certain 
coldness of temperament, in itself suggesting a want 
of imagination, or perhaps, a cynical indifference — 
' cynical,' mind you, from kyon, a dog — to incidents 
that should quicken the beating of every human heart. 
But I should advise you to think of this trait of our 
great Nation as indicating a praiseworthy reserve of 
the deepest feelings. I regard with respect those 
good people who to-day are going about their busi- 
ness in the streets of our town just in the usual way, 
although the most important news that has reached 
the town since the news of the capture of Antioch in 
1099, is expected this evening. And you will find that 
they will appear just as unconcerned if they learn 
that the terms of the Armistice have been accepted — 
they will stroll about with their hands in their pockets 
— not a cheer. ... Is that your mother calling you, 
John?" 

"No; I think it's somebody in the street?" said 
John. 

" Oh, I forgot. It's Monday — market day. 
There's more excitement in Yardley High Street if a 
cow turns into Waterport Lane than there will be 
when Peace is proclaimed. But still, I repeat, that 
this difference . . . What was that? two cows must 

have turned into Why, what's this — what's — sit 

down, all of you — I tell you it's only " 

" Hurrah — hurrah — hurrah — hurrah — hurrah ! " 
comes from the five young throats of five rosy- 
cheeked, unchecked children, responding to the five 
hundred that roar through the streets. 



300 A GARDEN OF PEACE 

In five minutes the front of our house is ablaze with 
flags, and five Union Jacks are added to the hundreds 
that young and old wave over their heads in the street ; 
and amid the tumult the recent admirer of the stolid 
English People is risking his neck in an endeavour to 
fix a Crusader's well-worn helmet in an alcove above 
the carven lions on the porch of his home. 

There, high over us, stands the Castle Keep as it 
stood in the days of the First Crusade. 

" And ever above the topmost roof the banner of 
England blew." 



Going out I saw a cow stray down Waterport 
Lane ; but no one paid any attention to its errantry. 



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